<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Fallout: The Great &amp; Terrible by Eric_dOrleans</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23499481">Fallout: The Great &amp; Terrible</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eric_dOrleans/pseuds/Eric_dOrleans'>Eric_dOrleans</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fallout (Video Games), RWBY</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Action/Adventure, Post-Apocalypse</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 10:27:55</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>27,486</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23499481</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eric_dOrleans/pseuds/Eric_dOrleans</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“Hello, my name is Ozpin,” the voice in my head said. “And we need to get out of this Vault.”</p>
<p>In Remnant’s dark future, a young vault dweller starts hearing a mysterious voice in his head. Driven from his home, Ozrick must brave the man in his head, the supernatural horrors of the Wasteland, and his frankly unproductive friends if he wants to be a true Huntsman and bring light to the Wasteland, or finish what Salem started so long ago.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Introduction</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><strong>Volume One: </strong>Patchwork Wasteland</p>
<p>
  <strong>Introduction</strong>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>— X —</p>
<p>War. War never changes.</p>
<p>When atomic fire rained down from the heavens and ripped humanity apart like silver eyes, no one was surprised. Few people could explain why it happened, but it happened pretty much as everyone predicted. Too many people hemmed in on all sides by the Grimm, with not enough space or resources to go around. No one can really remember the details, and the details wouldn’t change anything anyway.</p>
<p>Remnant was nearly wiped of life. A great cleansing, an atomic spark lit by human hands. <em>The Godhammer</em> ripped apart Heaven and Remnant both until there was no functional difference between the world of souls and ours. Humanity was almost extinguished, their spirits becoming part of the background radiation that blanketed the earth. The only things that walked Remnant after us were the unholy horrors of the Grimm. But without an afterlife anymore, even they grew sparse beneath the dying sky.</p>
<p>But it was not, as some had predicted, the end of the world. The Godhammer shattered the games of the Old Gods, but that was merely prologue to another bloody chapter in mankind’s history. Mankind was finally free. The Great and Terrible Wizard had succeeded. But war, war never changes.</p>
<p>Those that survived did so in enormous underground shelters called vaults. But when they emerged to reclaim the world that now belonged wholly to them, they had only the hell of the wastes to greet them. All except for Vault 4. For on that fateful day when the bombs finally dropped 124 years ago, the great metal doors of Vault 4 shut and never reopened. It is here that you were born. It is here that you will train. It is here that you will die.</p>
<p>Because in Vault 4, no one ever enters, and no one ever leaves.</p>
<p>Life in the vault is about to change.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Volume 1, Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><strong>Chapter 1:</strong> Fear</p>
<p>
  <span>
    <em>“The single quality that is common across every living creature on this planet is fear. It’s funny then, that as common as fear is, we so easily underestimate its power.”</em>
  </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>— 1 —</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>Catch!</em>
</p>
<p>It all came down to this. I raced forwards to catch the ball and charged the goal. The familiar weight of the old leather I’d thrown and caught until my hands were bloody. Nobody could stop me. Not with the eyes of the entire vault on me. The roar of the crowd.</p>
<p>This was it. <em>The</em> moment. Team OCHR against team BLNC for the future of the vault.</p>
<p>Behind my helmet, I grinned. And as that <em>pathetic dweeb</em> Conrad Sunbleach rushed onto the field to stop me, it only grew wider. He thought he could stop me with that hammer of his. I’d break his legs for that. Tackle through him like the vault monorail through debris. Put him and his team in its place!</p>
<p>I saw the look behind his helmet. Determined. Desperate. Sure, half the point of the Vytal Festival Tournament was to beat the tar out of the other team, but you made your points completing objectives. And I… I…</p>
<p>I blinked the sweat from my eyes. Kept running. Something felt wrong. Felt faint. Like I’d eaten something wrong. But I’d only been eating Vault-Tec Sports Paste this week to prepare for the game.</p>
<p>I blinked again, trying to get rid of the vague haze in my eyes. The sudden air of the stadium was oppressive.</p>
<p>Conrad Sunbleach. Sill there. He swung his hammer behind him, expelling a gust of force to propel himself towards me. Trying to intercept me. Trying… Trying…</p>
<p>Why couldn’t I see straight?</p>
<p>The roar of the crowd. The heat of my huntsman armor.</p>
<p>Conrad Sunbleach trying to stop me.</p>
<p>“Hello, my name is Ozpin,” the voice in my head said. “And we need to get out of this Vault.”</p>
<p>I lost my footing and tackled into Conrad, rolling over the astroturf into a jumbled, broken heap of limbs.</p>
<p>The referee blew the whistle. “Stop the game, stop damn you!”</p>
<p>“Ozrick!” someone shouted at me. “Ozrick! Ozrick, boy, what the hell was that?!”</p>
<p>Darkness overtook the edges of my vision like I’d stood up too quickly from the squat rack. The last thing I heard was that voice in my head again.</p>
<p>“Oh dear. It appears I’ve shown up at a bad time.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>— 2 —</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“Dammit, Oz, what the fuck was that?” the Coach said to me. He didn’t yell. He didn’t have to.</p>
<p>I sat in the clinic bed, staring at my legs. “I don’t know.”</p>
<p>“What happened to the months of practice? What happened out there to my star huntsman?”</p>
<p>I swallowed, gripping the clinic’s sterilized sheets. What was I going to say? <em>Oh yeah, I got sick there and started hearing voices</em>? Like that’ll go over well.</p>
<p>“Because of <em>you</em>, the Eastside’s team was able to win the game. When we needed you most, you just flaked out on us. You know what that means, Oz?”</p>
<p>I didn’t have to think hard. It meant the Westside just lost its Overseer. The results of the game put the Eastside’s candidate for Overseer in power. And with that came resource allocation. Eastside would get first pick on the freshest crops from hydroponics. They’d get priority on all maintenance work orders.</p>
<p>Hell, even the vault’s best artist, Pinkerton, would be reassigned from her work on the Westside to beautify the concrete halls of the East.</p>
<p>People I knew had trusted me. Had relied on me to win this game for the Vault. And now they were going to go hungry in their bleak halls of concrete.</p>
<p>“So much for our star huntsman, Oz.”</p>
<p>I cringed into myself. But as I looked at Coach Yarrow, the cold anger in his eyes, I heard his voice. Advice he’s given me time and time again over the years. <em>Never admit fault. Never admit weakness. Always attack</em>.</p>
<p>I grit my teeth and tried to rally myself. “It was a fluke. I broke that bastard’s leg. And when I see him again, I’ll break his other one.”</p>
<p>“Don’t act big with me, punk ass. He’s not the one who went ass-up in front of the entire vault.”</p>
<p>“Sunbleach is a pathetic loser who only got this far because his team carried him,” I spat, filling with righteous indignation. “Lemme at him again. Right now. I’ll break his other leg <em>and</em> get the winning trophy back.”</p>
<p>“You don’t get it, do you, kid? You’re supposed to know better.”</p>
<p>“I know that I <em>am</em> better!”</p>
<p>“So much better that you go down to your knees like a lower level whore right in front of him?”</p>
<p>“I broke his leg!” I shouted.</p>
<p>“He broke our winning streak!”</p>
<p>“Well,” I said, whiteknuckling, trying to find something to say to that, “maybe if you’d actually done your job and prepared us better for the game—!”</p>
<p>“Don’t you <em>dare</em> pin this on me, boy,” he hissed. “I’ve given you everything! Treated you like my own son, and what do I get in return? Some sniveling wreck who can’t even win a single game against the most pathetic team of Huntsmen the Eastside’s ever assembled. Fucking embarrassing. You sicken me, kid. I expected better of you, and you made me look like a fool out there!”</p>
<p>I found myself hugging my knees to my chest under his onslaught</p>
<p>The coach spat to the side. “Yeah, go ahead and cry. Maybe being a huntsman isn’t your true calling. Maybe mewling like a dying cat is. Go ahead. It seems to be all I’ve trained you for.”</p>
<p>“Don’t spit in my clinic, Yarrow,” Dr. Mossman said lazily from his chair near the front of the clinic.</p>
<p>“I’ll spit where I damn well please!” Coach Yarrow said, puffing up his chest. He wasn’t a big man by appearance (I had a full head over him), but he was a <em>big man</em> by nature.</p>
<p>Dr. Mossman spun round in a chair so old the plastic had actually carved grooves into the linoleum floor. “Then you’ll clean where you damn well please, too,” he said, bored.</p>
<p>Yarrow scowled before storming out of the clinic. He was gone, and I felt a sudden pit in my chest where my heart should have been.</p>
<p>The doctor looked at me for a long moment. “Boy as big as you shouldn’t be in the fetal.”</p>
<p>“Does it matter?” I snapped.</p>
<p>Unmoved, he said, “We scanned your vitals. Just some bruises, unlike Conrad and the leg you broke.”</p>
<p>“Good,” I said. “He deserves it for getting in my way.”</p>
<p>“Coach is gone,” he said, shaking his head. “You don’t have to act tough for him anymore.”</p>
<p>“I joined the Huntsmen course, not drama club.”</p>
<p>He spun around again in his chair, idly fidgeting with his Pip-Boy. “It shows. Maybe you’d be less transparent if you knew how to pretend.”</p>
<p>I opened my mouth, only to shut it and look away. “You wouldn’t get it. You’re essential personnel. They won’t cut your rations because you couldn’t carry a ball from one side of a field to another.”</p>
<p>“And I got that way because I knew what my strengths were and played to them. You might be big, but maybe you aren’t meant for sports.”</p>
<p>“What, and leave the annual game up to losers I can’t trust? Hell no. If I can make a difference, I’m gonna do anything I can to make it.”</p>
<p>“<em>And now I see why we matched</em>.”</p>
<p>I snapped my head around to him. “What’s that mean?”</p>
<p>He furrowed his salt-and-pepper brows. “What’s what mean?”</p>
<p>“That thing you just said, doc.”</p>
<p>He looked confused for a moment, before seeming to understand. “Oh. Just that what you’re good at might not be obvious. You ever used a Vigor Tester machine before?”</p>
<p>I sat forwards, letting my legs hang off a bed. “Yeah, a couple years back. Coach wouldn’t let any even train for a team unless the machine said they had the right aptitudes.”</p>
<p>“Ever think maybe what your best fit for mighta changed since then?”</p>
<p>I shook my head.</p>
<p>He spread his head. “Listen, down in maintenance, we got a spare one of them machines. I say while you recover from your strange… whatever it was that happened out on the field today, you go down there and try it out. Maybe help out the boys and girls down there, too.”</p>
<p>“Why would I do that?”</p>
<p>The doctor sat up straight, eying me. “Because something tells me you’ll want to lie low for a while, but can’t exactly sit still to do it. Down there you’ll find people who don’t care about the game and give you a chance to be useful.”</p>
<p>I frowned, thinking it over. “Do I gotta?”</p>
<p>“No. Just an idea.”</p>
<p>Getting to my feet, I sighed. “Then no thanks, doc. I gotta just… train more. Get back into the game. Get ready for next year’s big game.”</p>
<p>“Mm,” he hummed, disappointed. “That really wise anymore? You’re an adult now. The game closed out your final school year. And schools don’t usually keep kids around after that.”</p>
<p>“They do sometimes. If they’re good.”</p>
<p>“And you just lost them the game.”</p>
<p>I whirled on him. “Now listen here, you eggheaded f—”</p>
<p>“I interrupting something?” a girl asked.</p>
<p>Mossman continued looking at me like a disappointed father. He just shook his head and turned to his desktop computer. Gods, how I wanted to smash his head through the screen.</p>
<p>“Oof, seems so. Guess I’ll just take my cheer and goodwill elsewhere, hotshot.”</p>
<p>With Mossman ignoring my attempts to stare him down, I turned to the door. There stood a girl with lilac eyes and short red hair. And a body I’d been dead set on finally seeing without that combat dress of hers, if only we’d won tonight’s game. As it was, I immediately looked away.</p>
<p>She stood smiling, hands on hips, a gesture made slightly awkward by the folded up crossbow on her arm. “Gosh, Oz, you look très bad. How ya feeling? Hurting much?”</p>
<p>“Nice to see you too, Hailee,” I said dryly. “And it only hurts when I do this.”</p>
<p>“Do what?”</p>
<p>“Exist.”</p>
<p>She snorted. “I imagine. Saw the look on Coach Yarrow’s face after he stormed out. Figured you needed a few minutes to recover.” She tossed a bag at my feet.</p>
<p>“What’s this?”</p>
<p>“Your gear. C’mon. I don’t like seeing you mope.”</p>
<p>I took an uncomfortably long moment before I tried relying with, “I don’t like seeing you fully clothed.”</p>
<p>Mossman choked on his bottle of water. It was a small joy.</p>
<p>Hailee gagged. “Euch. Somebody call off the digger droids, this boy’s already dug himself deep enough into that there hole.”</p>
<p>“Ha ha,” said, fishing out my huntsman uniform and power fists.</p>
<p>“C’mon. You can embarrass yourself somewhere that doesn’t smell so badly of bleach.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>— 3 —</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Vault 4’s clinic opened out into the most central of the vault’s many atrium’s. This was <em>the</em> Atrium. Capital A. This massive chamber was built around the vault’s central freight elevator and provided the crossroads between the East and West. You had to go through here to use one of the vault’s essential services, from seeing the doctor to waiting in line for this week’s groceries. As I climbed down the stairs to a lower level, I could already see eastern vault security putting up barricades, preparing to slow down and limit food distribution to the east. They used the barriers we’d formerly put up against them.</p>
<p>“Hey, that Oz?” a westside officer said.</p>
<p>I kept my head down. But a guy my size in my distinctive Huntsman gear didn’t exactly have an easy time staying incognito.</p>
<p>“Yo, kid, what the fuck?” his partner called out.</p>
<p>“Leave him alone, dickheads!” Hailee snapped.</p>
<p>I kept walking. Past glaring Westsiders going through. Ignoring the occasion whistles and cheers from Easterners. Eastside residential was downstairs from the Atrium. And it was hard to pretend I didn’t see everyone down on my way home.</p>
<p>“They’re upset,” I said, unnecessarily.</p>
<p>Hailee rolled her eyes. “What gave it away?”</p>
<p>“The murderous look in their eyes, for one.”</p>
<p>“If that could stop you, you would’ve stopped hitting on me years ago.”</p>
<p>“I’m persistent,” I said evasively.</p>
<p>“Yeah, at not taking a hint.”</p>
<p>“Did you come find me just to beat me down?”</p>
<p>She sides, folding her arms behind her head. How it was uncomfortable with her crossbow, I didn’t know. “I ran out of better potions. Rene’s raging in the gym too much for me to want to talk to her, and July Child is busy trying to convince everyone that being strong and silent is a good substitute for having a personality.”</p>
<p>“That’s just team OCHR.”</p>
<p>“Pff, I’m bursting with personality. And,” she cut me off with, “if you turn that into a boob joke, I’m shooting you.”</p>
<p>“Charming.”</p>
<p>“One of us has to be,” she said with a wink, elbowing me in the side. “But for real, it was you or, like, my brother. But I didn’t want to bother him. He and the rest of hydroponics are too busy trying to save this cycle’s crops.”</p>
<p>As we talked, I realized she was refusing to bring up tonight’s game. The realization made my stomach turn. It made everything she said sound hollow, some attempt to cheer me up out of pity. When we finally reached my apartment, I was only too glad.</p>
<p>“You just gonna leave me here, Oz?” she asked.</p>
<p>I stood before the vertically sliding door to my apartment, about to type in the keycode to open it. “My mom’s home. It’d be weird.”</p>
<p>“Aw, c’mon. It’d only be weird if you watched. You know your mom's really got that—” she made some awkward purring noise in her throat that I think everyone regretted pretty much instantly.</p>
<p>“Don’t, uh, don’t ever do that again.”</p>
<p>“Deal,” she said quickly, looking anywhere but me.</p>
<p>In the silence, I heard the local AC kick in.</p>
<p>I took the moment to open the door and slip in before she could stop me. I held my back to the door and let out a shuddering sigh, rubbing eyes that suddenly felt three-days-dry. The lights in the apartment weren’t on.</p>
<p>“Hey, ma. I’m home,” I called out</p>
<p>She didn’t reply. I found her passed out on the couch, half-naked, and smelling of hydroponic whiskey. Her job as an upper level barmaid made it too easy to acquire. I recalled the night she’d first gotten the job. She’d come home and kissed me goodnight; the stench of the liquor had made me vomit. She’d spanked my ass and made me stay up late cleaning it all up.</p>
<p>In any case, if she was knocked this badly out, she likely hadn’t seen my game. I’d intimately knew how drunk she could get, and how long it took to get there. Under normal circumstances I’d be upset. But for once I was thankful. I carried her to her bed.</p>
<p>Technically, our apartment was just one giant room separated by dividers. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, and (most sinfully) our own private bathroom. It also had a rare window looking out onto the underground river that fueled the vault’s water reserves.</p>
<p>I collapsed into my own bed, wondering if we’d have to move because of my failure. Or if maybe I could get back into the game and keep my house. I had a feeling if we lost this place, mom would come to the wrong home drunk one night and wind up dead. It seemed in-character for her.</p>
<p>Whatever the case, the new training season wouldn’t start for a while. I was functionally out of work until then.</p>
<p>So I lay there in bed, staring at the ceiling fan, and let myself just drift off. Lose myself in my thoughts. Close my eyes. Rest.</p>
<p>“Rather dreary, isn’t it?”</p>
<p>I shot up. “Ma?!” The artificial light outside by the river indicated it was night. How long was I out for?</p>
<p>“No, I don’t think so,” he said with a chuckle.</p>
<p>I jumped to my feet, putting on my pneumatic power fists. They weren’t exactly lethal, but they had the force to knock an untrained player back several feet.</p>
<p>“Who’s there?”</p>
<p>“I’ve actually never been a woman before,” the voice went on, unconcerned. “Old men, young boys, even faunus. But never a woman.”</p>
<p>I took the bait. “What’s a faunus?”</p>
<p>The voice paused. “I suppose there weren’t many of them on Patch, were there?”</p>
<p>Mom was still asleep in bed, sprawled out in a bundle of limbs. Check as I might, I couldn’t find anyone in the apartment.</p>
<p>“Who are you?”</p>
<p>“I told you, my name is Ozpin.”</p>
<p>“What’s an Ozpin?”</p>
<p>“Not what, <em>who</em>.”</p>
<p>“That’s a douchebaggy correction to make.”</p>
<p>“And when I showed up, you wanted to kill a young man just for being on the other side of a sports game. I think I have the moral high ground.”</p>
<p>“Guys doing the right thing don’t need to hide.”</p>
<p>Another pause. Whoever he was, he liked to think before he spoke. You couldn’t trust people like that.</p>
<p>“Find a mirror,” he said.</p>
<p>“What?”</p>
<p>“Find a mirror.”</p>
<p>Against my better judgement, I obeyed. I turned on the bathroom lights and looked into it. There was my face, as you’d expect. Same hair. Same eyes. Except… the more I looked, the more something happened. As I watched, my face stretched and ripped, shaking and tearing into something else, <em>someone</em> else. I grabbed my face and screamed, and the old man with the white-blond hair and pea-sized glasses screamed too.</p>
<p>I stumbled back, falling into the shower.</p>
<p>“Well,” he said breathlessly. “I could have certainly been far unluckier, Ozrick, was it?”</p>
<p>I crawled forwards and climbed to my feet. My reflection was mine again. But if I looked away, I saw his face staring at me. A corner of the eye illusion. Trying to look at it was like trying to follow those blotchy spots in your eyes.</p>
<p>“Yeah. Ozrick.”</p>
<p>He chuckles. “Of course it is. Even murdering them doesn’t put an end to their little jokes.”</p>
<p>“Who?”</p>
<p>“Oh, nothing.”</p>
<p>I touched my face. It felt right. “You enjoy being cryptic, don’t you, Ozpin?”</p>
<p>“It’s one of my few remaining joys in life,” he admitted, sounding somehow sheepish.</p>
<p>I stumbled out of the bathroom back to the foot of my bed. “So. Great. I have that mind disease with the voices. It’s just… eat right, diet, exercise, and you <em>still</em> get fucked.”</p>
<p>“Don’t say that. Your girlfriend seemed nice.”</p>
<p>“Who, Hailee Comet?” I asked. “She’s not, I mean I <em>wish</em> she—but no. Just my partner.”</p>
<p>“Hmm. Seems Vault 4 is still doing its job. I take it you’re a Huntsman?”</p>
<p>I nodded, though I didn’t really know why. Like, why was I taking to the voice in my head. “Head of Team OCHR. Best Huntsmen in the vault. Or, used to be until today.”</p>
<p>“What’s your semblance?”</p>
<p>“My what?”</p>
<p>“Your aura?”</p>
<p>“Uh, people say I’m strong and full of life?”</p>
<p>“Show me your Pip-Boy.”</p>
<p>“I don’t have one.”</p>
<p>That seemed to stun Ozpin. “You live in a vault.”</p>
<p>I shrugged. “A very big one. We ran out of Pip-Boys forever ago. Only the lucky few have them. Essential and upper level personal, mostly.”</p>
<p>I waited for him to reply. But nothing came. Even the weird reflections on surfaces were  gone. It was just me. All alone again.</p>
<p>I didn’t know what to do. The latent schizophrenia disinclined me to sleeping. Trust me, I tried. It didn’t work. At some point I noticed a little light by the front door. During the night someone had delivered the mail.</p>
<p>I opened the slot and checked it. I tossed everything but me and mom’s weekend ratio coupons atop my trophy case. On friday night you got a larger surplus of coupons, with the idea being you could order a bit more food for the weekend. Or, so I thought. These coupons look like normal rations.</p>
<p>Of course they would be, I realized. Westside no longer gets first pick. Those extra coupons were probably already being delivered to upper level Eastside families as per direction of our new Overseer.</p>
<p>Fuck me.</p>
<p>Still, unable to sleep, and with Mom unlikely to remember to pick up groceries, I figured I could go out to the Atrium to pick up whatever scraps the Eastside had authorized us. I changed into my normal vault suit, tucked the coupons away, and headed out.</p>
<p>Outside the lights were dim, but still there. Vault night. I could even make out the faint lines of illuminum running near the floor, a subtle but everpresent light in case the power ever did fail. Brownouts were rare in the upper levels of residential. I’d only ever seen it in the lower, newer areas of the vault.</p>
<p>At this hour, the smell of antibac singed my nostrils. The janitors must have come by already to clean the halls, probably right after the mailman came around. I tried to ignore it. A benefit of being a team captain was living in the upper residential, which mean it was a quicker walk to the Atrium, where the comforting smell of food and human bodies overpowered even the most thorough attempts to scrub away odor.</p>
<p>I heard the shouting before I even reached the atrium.</p>
<p>— 4 —</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The central freight elevator was still settling in, bringing with it the latest and greatest produce from hydroponics. Already the earlier night shifters had queued up. But nervous and angry voices were turning order into tumult.</p>
<p>“Now calm down!” a member of vault security was trying to shout over the crowd. “You’ll get your food, same as always.”</p>
<p>“Bullshit!” someone shouted. “I got half my normal coupons this morning.”</p>
<p>“What’s going on? Why aren’t they opening yet?”</p>
<p>Inside the massive elevator, haulers and workers were setting up to hand out food. And they were all facing the wrong way, toward the east, not us to the west. You couldn’t miss it.</p>
<p>I tried to keep my head down and blend into the crowd, moving into to lose myself in the set of blue vault suits.</p>
<p>An officer was holding his hands out, using himself to separate the press of bodies from the closed doors to the freight lift. “Overseer LeForge is making sure—”</p>
<p>“LeForge?” someone shouted. “That Eastside fuck?”</p>
<p>“We lost the game last night, didn’t we?”</p>
<p>“No way. No fucking way. OCHR’s the best team we’ve had in years.”</p>
<p>“It’s true. That’s why I came early. I was up late last night watching the game.”</p>
<p>“We’re still getting our food, right?”</p>
<p>The freight elevator settled. The workers inside were ready. The crowd turned into a low, electric murmur. Which erupted into a roar as the <em>Eastside</em> gates opened up, and residents of the other side of the vault started pouring in to collect their weekend food. First pick, extra coupons meant they were walking away with armfuls.</p>
<p>“You need to get out of here,” Ozpin murmured.</p>
<p>“Oh, welcome back,” I said at the same volume, unsure if how loud I was actually meant anything to him. Clutching my ratio coupons tighter, I told me, “I’ll be fine.”</p>
<p>“Hey! Hey! What’s going on in there?” a vault dweller demanded.</p>
<p>“They’re taking all the food!”</p>
<p>“Now,” the security officer said, “there’s enough. There’s always been enough.”</p>
<p>“Bullshit! I got a cousin in hydroponics been saying there’s less and less!”</p>
<p>“That’s not true.”</p>
<p>“It’s true! And they’re gonna take all the food before we get it! My kids are gonna starve!”</p>
<p>Ozpin hummed. “Things are worse than I thought.”</p>
<p>“It’s fine; they’re just not used to change,” I said. “I’ll win next year’s game and everything will be fine.”</p>
<p>“But until next year?”</p>
<p>“We survive.”</p>
<p>“They, maybe. But not you. Look at them.”</p>
<p>“It’s fine.”</p>
<p>“Hey! Hey, it’s Ozrick!” a woman said. “Ozrick, you gotta tell ’em. No way you lost us.”</p>
<p>I froze in place. Of course they’d know me. Even without my huntsman armor, I stood out. And how many of them had spent hours watching or listening to my games, either in person or on the Vault New Network?</p>
<p>“What’s he doing out this late?”</p>
<p>“He knows there’s no food and’s trying to get the last of it! That’s why!”</p>
<p>My voice left me. “I, I, that’s not—”</p>
<p>“What’s the star huntsman doing? That fucker, what the fuck did you do?”</p>
<p>“Ozrick,” the man in my head said, “you need to leave.”</p>
<p>I swallowed and tried to rally myself. “Everyone, listen, it’s just…” Just what? Just failed them? Just wasn’t good enough? Just suddenly got sick and now everyone in the Westside was a second-class citizen?</p>
<p>Crowds had a mind of their own. A kind of collective consciousness I’d come to realize during Vytal Festival games. Something animal. And as if realizing they weren’t going to get through security or the freight elevator’s gates, they turned to me, a soft, human victim. A face they could put a name to, put blame to.</p>
<p>“How many coupons do you have, boy?”</p>
<p>“He’s got plenty. Look at them! He’s upper Westside.”</p>
<p>Ozpin made a warning noise. “You need to leave.”</p>
<p>“I can handle this,” I said, either to Ozpin to the crowd, I didn’t know.</p>
<p>“You’re going to get hurt,” he said, concern audibly increasing.</p>
<p>“I can handle this!” I repeated, gritting my teeth.</p>
<p>A woman grabbed my arm. Mrs. Abernathy, I recognized. I’d thrashed her son in the Westside playoffs. “Ozrick, please. Jimmy’s still a little slow on his feet. You can spare coupons, right? Please?”</p>
<p>I just stood there, staring.</p>
<p>“He’s giving his coupons back!”</p>
<p>“I, uh, no,” I stammered. “This is, me, my mom—”</p>
<p>“You don’t need the food! You’re big enough. And your mom makes plenty too!”</p>
<p>“These, these are ours. For the weekend. I, our food, and—”</p>
<p>Mrs. Abernathy tugged on my arm. Someone else grabbed at my shoulder.</p>
<p>“They’re going to hurt you, Ozrick,” Oz said. He sounded equal part worried and helpless. Like a man watching his favorite sports team slowly lose the final game.</p>
<p>“It’s alright,” I tried, feeling my heart punching a hole through my chest.</p>
<p>They were saying something. Pulling at me. Trying to get at my rations.</p>
<p>“Ozrick, please!”</p>
<p>“Boy, give her the coupons!”</p>
<p>“No, no, I need more too. My baby’s sick!”</p>
<p>“It’s my brother’s birthday, too! I can’t let him go hungry on his birthday!”</p>
<p>“Ozrick!” they’d shout, tugging. Pulling. “Ozrick!”</p>
<p>The calm voice. “Ozrick.”</p>
<p>“Ozrick! Ozrick!”</p>
<p>“You greedy bastard!”</p>
<p>“I always knew you’d screw us over, kid!”</p>
<p>“Ozrick!”</p>
<p>Ozpin again, almost pleading against all hope, like a man praying for a surprise homerun at the bottom of the ninth inning. “They’ll kill you. I’ve seen this before. Either now or through guilt.”</p>
<p>“It’s alright!”</p>
<p>“It’s not alright!” Mrs. Abernathy said hysterically, pulling harder at my arm. “Please, kid, you owe me for what you did to my boy!”</p>
<p>“You owe us all! You were supposed to win!”</p>
<p>I tried backing away, but the press of bodies kept me rooted. “I’ll win the next game!”</p>
<p>“And what if we’re all starving my then!”</p>
<p>“Ozrick,” the voice said again as Mrs. Abernathy got her hands on the packet of coupons.</p>
<p>My heart ripped through my ribcage. Cold and hot blood crept through my veins like syrup. “That’s enough!” I shouted, shoving Mrs. Abernathy away.</p>
<p>The crowd went quiet as she stumbled back. If not for the bodies, she would have hit the ground.</p>
<p>The woman broke down crying, and any restraint the crowd had. People grabbed at me. Pounded at me. Someone even tried punching me in the face. They pressed against me, and I found myself stuck in place, unable to move. Unable to breathe.</p>
<p>I didn’t know what to do. Couldn’t do anything. I grabbed at my heads and tried to defend myself against the people I’d failed. People I’d betrayed and let down. People who were going to go hungry because of me.</p>
<p>“They’re going to take your rations,” Ozpin said. “They blame you, and they’ll blame your mother too.”</p>
<p>“Shut up!”</p>
<p>I imagined it. Me and mom trying to get food and the people not allowing us. Taking our coupons. I pictured my mom returning home from a shift and getting robbed and beaten. All because I couldn’t carry a ball just a few more yards.</p>
<p>I was breathing hard. Seeping spots in my eyes. They felt wet. Was I crying? <em>Yeah, go ahead and cry</em>, Couch Yarrow had said to me. <em>It seems to be all I’ve trained you for.</em> I tightened my defensive curl harder, trying to keep my coupons, trying to ignore their desperate, frantic hands.</p>
<p>“You don’t belong here,” Ozpin said. “Your home has turned against you.”</p>
<p>“No!” I screamed.</p>
<p>“People who love and care for you don’t do this. They never liked you. They tolerated you because you could win them the game. And now you can’t. You’re worthless to them.”</p>
<p>“Shut up!”</p>
<p>He chuckled sadly. “I can help you.”</p>
<p>“You can’t help anything. Because of you I lost! They’re like this because of you!”</p>
<p>“And <em>I</em> can help <em>them</em>.”</p>
<p>“How!” I screamed.</p>
<p>“It’s going to take trust.”</p>
<p>Someone grabbed at my arm, their nail digging bloody furrows as they tried to pry my coupons away.</p>
<p>“No!”</p>
<p>“Either trust me, or let them kill you and your mother. Your call.”</p>
<p>“Stop it!”</p>
<p>“This vault is no place for you, Ozrick. You do not belong here. And no one wants you anymore. You have failed them. But I can help you. We’re all we each have right now. I’m the only one who can give you a hand up.  Fear and hatred are a downhill wheel; you’re the only brakes. The only way you and your mother will be safe is if you reach out now.” </p>
<p>I dry heaved. “Okay! Okay! Anything. Just make it stop!”</p>
<p>“Good,” he said with an air of pleased finality.</p>
<p>Someone boxed my ear. I stumbled back.</p>
<p>Ozpin let out a calm breath and chanted, “Through the darkness of future past, the wizard longs to see. One last chance to save this world. Aura walk with me.”</p>
<p>Everything was silent. Quiet. Peaceful. Warm and comforting.</p>
<p>Then came the screaming. Terrified, panicked, desperate. The crowd was screaming. The man who tried punching me was screaming. Mrs. Abernathy was screaming.</p>
<p>
  <em>I am screaming.</em>
</p>
<p>I opened my eyes to see the fallen crowd around me, bathed in an ethereal light from my very skin. Pushed back as if my some unstoppable force that could repel even the mindless singularity of a mob. Mrs. Abernathy’s hands were mangled. The man who’d been punching me, his arm was broken, bone piercing through his flesh.</p>
<p>I knew I’d done this somehow. This was all my fault. The desperate people I’d betrayed now broken and bloody around me in a hellishly screaming pile. And there I was in the center, standing tall. A glowing eye in a storm of human misery.</p>
<p>“Oh Gods,” Ozpin whispered. “I am so sorry.”</p>
<p>I looked uselessly at my hands</p>
<p>“You can’t stay here, Ozrick.”</p>
<p>I wanted to help. Pick them up. Tend to their wounds. Do something for them. How many of these faces did I know? How many of them had been cheering me on every week for years? How many of them had included me in their prayers?</p>
<p>
  <em>This is my fault.</em>
</p>
<p>But instead of helping them, <em>instead of doing the right thing</em>, I just stood there, paralyzed. The screams of terror and pain.</p>
<p>“They’re going to blame you,” Ozpin said, sounding like a man grasping for rapidly disappearing straws. “This shouldn’t have happened. This isn’t normal, but—you can’t stay here, Ozrick. You need to run!”</p>
<p>Cries for help. Shouts of people trying to find their family members in the field of bodies. And all I could do was stand there. Stand there and watch. And listen. Like some fucking coward.</p>
<p>Something hit me from behind, hard. I turned to see a distant and terrified member of vault security holding a shotgun. The riot control beanbag bounced off my glow, tumbling to the ground. I just stared at it, uselessly.</p>
<p>He pumped the gun and fired again. I barely stumbled from the impact.</p>
<p>“<em>Run, Ozrick,</em>” Ozpin commanded, as the full gravity of what was happening started to hit me. “<em>You have no place here anymore</em>.”</p>
<p>He was right. He was right, he was right, and he was right.</p>
<p>The officer chambered another round, his hands shaking. I turned and ran, running over the fallen bodies like they were a human carpet. Running, Apologizing. And crying.</p>
<p>“<em>We need to get out of this vault.</em>”</p>
<p> </p>
<hr/>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Quest Perk Added:</em> <strong>Star Huntsman</strong> — As a Star Huntsman on the Path of the Warrior, you have a born ability with weapons, dealing +10% Damage with all weapons.</p>
<p><em>Vault-Tec Tutorial:</em> <strong>Aura</strong> — While every living being has an Aura, you possess an <em>Active Aura</em>. The mark of a true Huntsman, your Active Aura is a reflection of your very soul. Your SPECIAL stats, skill points, and even certain quest actions all affect your Aura. You are able to use Active Aura to defend yourself, enhance yourself in combat, or even utilize special pre-war Huntsman equipment.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Volume 1, Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><b>Chapter 2:</b> Escape<br/><em><span>“You're a real sicko, you know that?”<br/>“Don’t say that! My mother said that! I’ll make you pay! I’m a good boy, right mommy?”</span></em><br/><br/>— 5 —</p><p>
  <span>“Attention!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The voice over the intercom startled me away from the sink where I’d been washing the blood off my hands. If this was playing from the speaker in my apartment, this was an entire vault-wide announcement. And at this late hour, that meant it was serious. I stepped outside, drying my hands on my vault suit.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“This is Overseer LeForge. I apologize for waking many of you, but this is not a victory speech. I have not come to gloat or lord myself over the Westside. The election season is a trying time, and I know many residents are scared of the new administration. But despite that, we cannot allow ourselves to be divided and fight among ourselves. We </span>
  <em>
    <span>cannot</span>
  </em>
  <span> be like young Mr. Ozrick, head of Team OCHR, whose stubborn refusal to accept his failure led to several critical injuries on innocent Westside citizens during tonight’s food rationing.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My blood ran cold and I had to sit down.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“If you see Ozrick, please do not approach him. He is considered armed and dangerous. Instead, report him to vault security and quickly proceed to the nearest safe place. We’ll get through this together, and tomorrow build a brighter, more peaceful vault. Remember: ‘Today 4 Survival, Tomorrow 4 Victory.’ Thank you for listening.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I grabbed the sides of my head and tried to control my breathing. Any hopes of trying to keep tonight under wraps had just died. Eastside’s Overseer had murdered it. Sure, in the vault, word gets around. But there’d been a chance to do damage control. Maybe. But whatever happened, </span>
  <em>
    <span>that</span>
  </em>
  <span> was people’s first news of the incident. He controlled the narrative. And I was the bad guy.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I was a criminal. Hell, I was a terrorist. An easy enemy for the Overseer to unite people against to cement himself in power. Most criminals were petty ones in the lower levels. But this was different. I’d heard in the old days, before the vault began the Vytal Festival, they’d had to execute people.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I knew if the situations were reversed, I’d want my head. I’d want to punish the guy who hurt so many people. And with the entire Westside blaming me for what happened last night, there wouldn’t be much objections.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m sorry, Ozrick,” the man in my head said with a sigh.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Shut up!” I snapped, throwing a book across the room. “This is your fault. None of this would be happening if you’d just stayed out of my head. Get the fuck out of my head; it’s my head, not yours, you sick bastard!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I know,” he said, like a man facing his execution with a calm dignity. “Awaking Aura can have violent reactions, depending on the person. I knew this, and I trudged on. If I could take it back, I would. Everything from you getting sick at the game to the rather violent reaction to your Aura, that’s my fault. And I’m sorry.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I looked at my trophy close, looking for his reflection. Something I could glare at. He was agreeing with me. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Apologizing</span>
  </em>
  <span>. That wasn’t according to the script I’d been preparing in my head.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I didn’t choose to come here, Ozrick,” he said. “It’s always rough, the first few days. Yours more than most.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What could be worse than this?” I sneered.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“The suicides,” he said soberly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>That gave me pause. I wasn’t sure how to reply.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He sighed. “Ozrick, I can tell you’re a good kid. You’re trying to do your best. Not perfect, but you’re </span>
  <em>
    <span>trying</span>
  </em>
  <span>. That’s what we have in common.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Is having shit in common gonna help me get through this?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes,” he said quietly. “I caused this. But I think I have the solution.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I snorted. “How many innocent people this gonna hurt this time?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I somehow sensed him flinching, which was a bizarre sensation. “Far fewer than most of my attempts.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“One is too many,” I countered.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re absolutely right. But it was a cruel world with cruel people even before the bombs fell,” he said. “But for now, in Vault 4, the people here can’t last like this. What if you could save them?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’d do it,” I said without hesitation. “But how?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I think I understand the problem here. The vault overseers didn’t manage the population growth with the hydroponics, and it just snowballed due to politics. But what if you could save them somewhere else?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I didn’t reply.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“There’s a whole world outside this vault. Up there, people are still alive. Animals, farms, fish. Things the vault needs to support itself.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I found myself perking up, listening to him. But with every word, something hammered in my heart. Driving icy nails into me.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You don’t know that.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I do. I’ve been outside the vault.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re just a voice in my head!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“For the time being, maybe,” he said. “Which is a damn sight better than I’ve been this last century and a half. Which is why I’m doing everything I can to help you, Ozrick, poor job as it’s been so far. I don’t want to die again so soon. I don’t know where I’d go, but I </span>
  <em>
    <span>know</span>
  </em>
  <span> that where I am now, I can make a difference. </span>
  <em>
    <span>We</span>
  </em>
  <span> can make a difference.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Maybe if you helped me understand, I’d be able to.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s complicated. All I can tell you, is that I can’t undo what I’ve done. But, I can make things right with you. I can help save your vault.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I swallowed and found myself pacing the apartment. “That’s… let’s say you’re right. The vault door is sealed. No one’s ever left the vault. Everyone knows that.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“RWBY4EVR,” he said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s the code to open the vault,” he said casually.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You can’t know that.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Ozrick,” he said, as if I were an unruly child he were tired of, “who do you think built the vaults?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I blinked in surprise. “That… So what? You’re some immortal poltergeist, possessing people and things until someone finally exorcises you?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“But it’s true, except for the exorcism. There’s a lot of things I know. And I can tell you later, but first you need to leave. There’s no point telling secrets to a corpse.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I wanted to challenge him. Call him out. But something in his weary tone made me think he was being honest. And I wanted to hear his idea out.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“If you stay here, Ozrick, they’re going to kill you. You’ll have lived and died in a hole in the ground with nothing to show for it. All the work you put into helping people, all the good you </span>
  <em>
    <span>can</span>
  </em>
  <span> do, all of it wasted.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That’s…” I paused, looking at my still sleeping mother. “I can’t leave.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Do you have a choice?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I stared at my feet.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“If you listen to me, if you </span>
  <em>
    <span>leave</span>
  </em>
  <span>, then you can return a hero. You can find sources of food. Turn your vault into a bastion of Wasteland civilization. Make a difference, both in here and out there. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Be a Huntsman</span>
  </em>
  <span>. That’s what you are, right? A Huntsman. Did you know in the old days Huntsman were more than just warriors?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I nodded. “Yeah. That’s why we do the Vytal Festival. Huntsmen used to fight evil. But they also used to protect people. Save them. We’re supposed to train them. To be ready to leave the vault one day and save the world.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Consider this your one day, Ozrick.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I wrung my hands. “I…”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“One day, </span>
  <em>
    <span>today</span>
  </em>
  <span>, because tomorrow you’ll be dead.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Okay,” I said quietly, almost a whisper. “Okay, I’ll… okay, yeah.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Good,” he said, letting go a breath of relief. “Get your things. Food, water, armor. Anything. We’re going to need it.”</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>— 6 —</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>When they knocked on my door, I knew I was too late. I tightened the last strap on my backpack. This late in the week, there wasn’t much food left. I did find me and mom’s old water canteens and killed them out.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Pneumatic fists ready I opened the door. Only to find Hailee standing there. “Ozrick!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I pulled her into the room and closed the door.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Ozrick, what the hell is going on?” she demanded, vaguely out of breath. She must have run here. “The Vault New Network says people are hurt. And now the Overseer is saying you did it and—why are you dressed that way?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Things got out of hand,” I said quickly, self-conscious tugging at my lightly armored Huntsman jacket. My weighted vault suit felt suddenly heavy under her gaze. “You watched the news.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“But I want to hear it from </span>
  <em>
    <span>you</span>
  </em>
  <span>.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“People got desperate. And now I’m going to save the vault.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She laughed mirthlessly. “Ozrick, did you lose your mind in the last couple hours?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes, but that’s not the point, Hailee. But you know if I have a plan, it’s a good one.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Slow down, Oz!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I grabbed her wrist. “Look, I’m—” I’m what? I’ve been possessed by an all-knowing, apologetic ghost who told me the secret to leaving the vault? Oh yeah, and I was leaving the vault too.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>None of that, I knew, would go over well. Not this soon.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oz?” she asked, lilac eyes wide.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Look, remember when we met? Those boys were picking on you. You were scared and alone, and I offered to help. But together we kicked their asses so no one would ever mess with us again.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She nodded.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s like that now. Shit went bad, and now I’m all alone. And I need you to trust me. Listen to me. So that we can save the vault and no one will ever fuck with us again.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re not making any sense.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I pulled her in closer. “It’s complicated and scary but I’m doing my best, yeah? I need you to trust me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I always have,” she said after a moment’s hesitation.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Then I need you to have my back tonight.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“If I do, then will you tell me what’s going on?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Promise,” I lied. Because I didn’t think I’d ever be able to make sense enough of the truth to explain it. “Do you have your gear on you?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She inhaled deeply. “I got my crossbow. I always do.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Good. I’ve got everything I can get. We need to go; if you figured out I’m here, you can’t be the only one.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Hailee stared at me.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re trusting me, right?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She nodded. “Then we need to go. Don’t worry; we’re going to save the vault.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Then c’mon.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I opened the door, looked back once last time, and left the apartment. With that same look of scared confusion, Hailee followed me at a jog.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>We didn’t make it far before someone shouted. “Hey, there he is! Stop in the name of—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I didn’t stop running, barreling into the security officer. It sent him flying into the wall. It just happened. He was in my way and it was just the easiest way to stop him. On some level, I felt this was </span>
  <em>
    <span>the</span>
  </em>
  <span> moment I crossed a line. I wasn’t just running. I was fighting back.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I was acting the monster they expected me to be.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But, if I wanted to escape the vault to save it, did I have a choice?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Holy shit!” someone said, sticking their head out from their room.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Ozrick, he was security!” Hailee said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’ll be okay,” I said quickly, refusing to think about it. Refusing to let </span>
  <em>
    <span>her</span>
  </em>
  <span> make me think about it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m sorry, sir!” she told the barely conscious officer.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>If security was already here, then there was no way I was going up a normal way. The security wing was linked to the central Atrium. Going the direct way to the vault door would be suicide. So I did the only logical thing I could do and found the stairs to lower apartment levels.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>From there, it wasn’t hard to find what I was looking for. A door with green paint and a “Maintenance” label. The button didn’t work, so I grabbed the handles by its bottom and forced it up. The metal was heavy, but I was strong.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The halls beyond were dimly lit, even by nighttime hallways standards. The only real way navigate was by the illuminium. A barely legible directional sign told me which way to go.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Ozrick, where are we going?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Maintenance and janitorial passage run all throughout the vault,” I said, still running. “Out of sight and mind of normal citizens. I used to sleep with a lower level girl who told me all about it. Learned a lot from her.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Like I suspected, the narrow side tunnels were empty. I followed the glowing lines on the floor until I found a staircase. I must have been near the Atrium. Upper maintenance was where the essential personnel worked. I’d seldom ever been up there. Last time I could recall was a year ago to get the key to our new apartment. But today was a day of firsts.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Hailee hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, but hurried after me. “Where are we going?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Still figuring that out,” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“How reassuring!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There was a door at the top of the stairwell. The button actually worked this time. The light beyond nearly blinded me. I stepped through covering my eyes. The floor beyond looked like the markets in the Atrium, a wide space with shops lining the walls. Each one listed what they specialized in within. Waterworks, pipeworks, janitorial, Pip-Boys, robotics, weapons.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Weapons?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh shit, it’s the kid!” an officer stepping out of the weapon store said. She fumbled for her pistol and managed to fire a shot from the hip. It pinged off the wall, the ricochet grazing Hailee.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>They’re using live rounds,</span>
  </em>
  <span> I thought numbly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And then: </span>
  <em>
    <span>She’s going to kill Hailee!</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>I surged forwards, unthinking and desperate. If she shot me, so what. But I couldn’t let her hurt Hailee. I swept the officer’s legs out from under her and rammed my fist into her face. The pneumatic fist went off, expelling compressed air. She flew down the hall, tumbling, and bleeding. Her armored faceplate lay shattered.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Lizzy!” Hailee shouted. “That’s Lizzy! My neighbor! You just—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“She almost killed you, Hailee!” I snapped. It sounded like the right thing to say, at least. I didn’t believe it exactly. The girl was probably okay. Dead people stopped bleeding the moment their heart stopped, right? And she was currently bleeding from the shards of faceplate glass in her face. So she was fine. She was okay. Just unconscious. Medical could fix her right as rivets.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Hailee held a hand to her side, where the bullet had grazed. Her hand came back blooding. She looked more shocked than hurt. “Oh my gods they’re shooting. Real bullets. </span>
  <em>
    <span>At you</span>
  </em>
  <span>.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Can you walk?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her mouth was hanging a little open. She nodded as if just waking up from a dream.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“C’mon. We need to get out of here.” I grabbed her arm and pulled her with me and ran for the other end of the floor. Until Ozpin stopped me.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Ozrick, wait. Pip-Boys. Go there.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What? No! That’s out of the way.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Do you know where you’re going?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I stopped. “I, I don’t know. Forwards, I guess. Just forwards.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Go in there.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oz, who are you talking to?” Hailee asked, tugging her arm from my grip.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I looked at her, unsure how to reply.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We both know you don’t know what to say,” Ozpin told me wearily, like talking was draining him. “Believe me when I say it’s better that way. No one can know about me. It never works out.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I felt vaguely nauseous for a moment, though I didn’t know why. It wasn’t normal nausea; it was the weird one I’d felt when Ozpin first spoke to me.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Okay,” I said. Now wasn’t the time for questions. Like Hailee trusted me, I’d have to trust Ozpin here. I didn’t really have a choice in any case.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What?” she asked with a faint tremble. She idly rubbed her bleeding wound.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Sorry,  thought you said something,” I told her, turning to the Pip-Boy maintenance bay.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Figuring what the hell, I entered the bay. It wasn’t a big place. Just looked like a machine shop. And a fairly small one at that. All grey concrete walls that really needed a mural or something to prevent whoever worked here from killing themselves. The only person was a small-framed girl in vault utility barding, a screwdriver in her mouth. She’d been working on a Pip-Boy, but was currently leaning back in her chair, trying to see the commotion. The tool fell from her mouth the moment I stormed in.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hold on, don’t kill me!” she said, jumping to her feet and holding up her hands.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I pushed passed her to see the lone Pip-Boy. It was an elegant device. A sort of sleek, wrist-mounted computer attached to a biometric glove. Once upon a time, everyone in Vault 4 had one. But that was decades ago. This one looked spit-shined, freshly tuned-up, and painted.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Vytal Festival Champion.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>This would have been mine. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Should</span>
  </em>
  <span> have been mine. The prize for winning the Vytal Festival. A permanent, life-long status symbol.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You need that,” Ozpin said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Put this on me,” I told the technician.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She swallowed, backing against the wall. Eyes wide, she said, “It’s, it’s not for you. Not keyed to you. Won’t work if you—it’s for Conra—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I grabbed her collar. “Key this to me, girl. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Please</span>
  </em>
  <span>.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I can’t! I’ll lose my job!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I recognized that look in her eyes. That fear mixed with an unwillingness to change. This woman had probably been groomed for Pip-Boy maintenance since she was a little girl. Given how old she was, we might have even known each other back in kindergarten. She wasn’t being defiant because she had a backbone, no. She was being defiant because I was asking her to break the only rules she’s ever really known. Trying to break the kind of occupational inertia that came with a lifelong vault career.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Ozrick,” Ozpin said, his voice straining to get the begging heard. “Don’t do anything rash. I know violence seems easy, and believe me we both know it’d work, but you want to be better than that, right?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I nodded weakly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I understand. A moment ago you were scared for Hailee. But this girl poses no threat to you. Huntsmen weren’t only slayers and killers; sometimes they were diplomats and photographers and poets. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Think this through</span>
  </em>
  <span>. How you handle this will be how everyone remembers you in Vault 4.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>As I stared at her, the line from an old Spruce Willis holofilm came to mind. A line that maybe I could pull off. Just to try to scare her over the edge into compliance</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I don’t care what you can or can’t do,” I said coldly, wishing I really had joined the drama club for once in my life. “</span>
  <em>
    <span>Do it now</span>
  </em>
  <span> or I’ll break another finger.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Another?” she asked, looking at her hands.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I grabbed one of her small, delicate pinkies. “First one’s non-negotiable. Shows you I mean business.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Pip-Boy technician girl felt so small and fragile beneath my fingers. If I really wanted to, I bet I could easily snap every one of her fingers. Of course, I didn’t want that. I had no intentions of hurting her. I was a Huntsman, like Ozpin said. But I had to make her believe I would. It was the only way to get a Pip-Boy and save the vault.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Hailee grabbed me from behind. “Ozrick, that’s enough!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>For a moment I wasn’t sure if Ozpin had said that, or if it was her. Maybe both at one.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I just stared at her, unable to really understand what she was doing. She must have known I was quoting a holofilm. Hell, I’m pretty sure I first watched it with her. And Hailee </span>
  <em>
    <span>knew</span>
  </em>
  <span> me. She had to know I wouldn’t really hurt the techie. Had to know I was just acting the part.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The look in her eyes sent my heart into my stomach, where it dissolved in acid.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I know what I’m doing, Hailee,” I said, trying not to crack. To keep up my big, scary façade for the techie. “But I need this.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Hailee just stood rooted in place, teeth grit, and eyes oddly wet. “Ozrick, you’re scaring me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You know me. I wouldn’t be doing this for no reason,” I said. I could see Ozpin’s reflection staring back at me from a nearby computer monitor, frowning like he expected to hear the news that his wife miscarried. “You’ve trusted me all your life. Don’t throw that all away now because things are scary, okay?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I turned back to the techie. She was hyperventilating so badly she doubled over and dry heaved. I grabbed her ponytail and pulled her up. “Key it to me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Okay, okay!” she cried, tears rolling down her face. “Just, just, I, I need, need—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I sat down and put my arm on the table. “You don’t need all your fingers, I already know this.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Hands too shaky to even hold a wrench, she slid the Pip-Boy to my arm. I pulled up my sleeve and put on the glove. It fit surprisingly well. The techie snapped the back over my arm, fitting it rather snugly. She pulled out a chord from the device and connected it to a computer.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It, it, it’s not fast. Gonna be a thing to key you. Or it won’t work. It’s a dianetic gene lock and… Do, do… no, of course not. You don’t even know…” She devolved into incoherent mumbling. “No one does.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I looked at the Pip-Boy’s screen as it booted up. In big letters, it said, “Please Aura Charge Your Pip-Boy If Able.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Aura. That was a word Ozpin used. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Aura walk with me</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I held up my arm, feeling the weight of the device. Not as heavy as I suspected. “That thing you did to me earlier,” I said, muttering so only Oz would hear me. “Was that an Aura?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes,” he said slowly. “It’s complex. Not easy to learn. Before the war it was rare; Huntsman who activated theirs took nearly a decade to train it enough to go out on missions. Most never mastered it. It’s my fault yours activated in that situation. But yes, you do have one now.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A pause.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Another thing I’m sorry for,” he mumbled.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“How do I use it?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s unique to everyone. You need to want it. I suggest you think of why you fight. People you want to protect. Eventually it’ll become second nature to you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I thought of my mother. I thought of the betrayed, broken people I’d left behind in the Atrium. I thought of Hailee, standing there, tears in her eyes as she hugged herself. I was going to make this all worth it. I was being cruel to be kind. Brutal and efficient. Charging through obstacles so I didn’t have to hurt anyone I didn’t need to.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I didn’t need to look in the monitor to see Ozpin shaking his head as if at a lost cause.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I grit my teeth and apologized to them all in my head. Because I was going to come back a hero. Save the vault. Everyone was going to be happy. Everything was going to be okay.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The techie gasped. Even Hailee took a step back, mouth open.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I was glowing. That soft but profound color that had hurt so many people in the Atrium. On the computer screen, words and software rapidly flashed by. And then the words appeared in my eyes themselves.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh shit oh shit oh shit,” the techie was breathing, unable to get any further away from me.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Congratulations on the Aura activation of your new BeaCo Pip-Boy! The finest tool for assisting the Huntsman on the go</span>
  </em>
  <span>—</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I blinked hard, and the entire dialog box vanished. Only for more to appear.</span>
  <em>
    <span> This is your Heads-Up Display (HUD)</span>
  </em>
  <span>—</span>
  <em>
    <span>Your BeaCo Pip-Boy is able to passively draw on your Active Aura to perform many functions</span>
  </em>
  <span>— </span>
  <em>
    <span>Among the many features of your new BeaCo Pip-Boy is</span>
  </em>
  <span>—</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I swatted at the air to make the words go away, and time ground to a halt. Or, rather, everything was in slow motion. Hailee was highlighted in neutral colors, showing an assessment of her Aura (zero), her defense, how strong she was, and a percentage indicator on her limbs.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>V.A.T.S, or Vault-Tec Aura-Assisting Targeting System, allows you to assess foes and better</span>
  </em>
  <span>—</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I willed it away, though I didn’t understand how. Reality went back to normal speed, with the girls staring at me. My glowing Aura vanished, but my HUD persisted, displaying a measure of my Aura and other miscellaneous details in the corners of my vision. It reminded me of the way Ozpin’s face hovered at the edge of my perception.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Ozrick, how long have you been able to do that?” Hailee asked. “What even is it?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Amazing,” the techie breathed, awe briefly winning over fear.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I flexed my Pip-gloved hand. It was feeling more and more natural. While there was a lot on the Pip-Boy’s touchscreen UI I didn’t understand, I’d used a computer before. I could figure it out. As for everything else?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“How do I get out of here?” I asked, waving my hand.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Time froze again. I could see Hailee mid-blink, eyes moving comically slow. A glowing line appeared before me, the same color as my HUD, leading me out of the maintenance bay. Another tutorial popped up. </span>
  <em>
    <span>V.A.N.S. (Vault-Tec Assisted Navigational System)</span>
  </em>
  <span>—</span>
  <em>
    <span>let Vault-Tec guide you! The path to your closest target is displayed in V.A.T.S. Note that this requires a pre-built navmeshed map. Not recommended for use in the wilderness or secret government facilities.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>Convenient.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hailee, c’mon,” I said, standing up. “And sorry for scaring you, little Pip-girl.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The techie just stared, nodding weakly. Hailee stood rooted in place. Ozpin made a weird rotating gesture with his hand.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hailee!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What are you?” she asked quietly. The question made my skin itch</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m Ozrick,” I said. “You’re best friend. And I’m going to save the vault.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I needed to push her before she was willing to follow me again. Outside, two more security officers had arrived and were tending to the girl I’d clocked out.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Good. She’ll probably recover in a year.” Ozpin idly commented.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>In hindsight, they were already there, displayed as little red pips on the bottom on my head even before I’d seen them. The one who wasn’t getting stimpaks out from a first aid kit reached for his pistol. VANS said to go the other way, thankfully.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Stop! Stop, damn you!” the man shouted, and started shooting.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>We ducked into another maintenance shop, scaring the engineers within. My HUD marked them as yellow pips. The officer followed, but didn’t shoot with so many bystanders. VANS led me to a door in the back, which someone had parked a desk in front of. Some elbow grease tossed the desk to the side and opened the slightly rusty door.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was an emergency maintenance stairwell. The lights were off, and even the illuminium didn’t work, Nobody had been back here in years. After some fiddling, I managed to turn on the light on my Pip-Boy and set it to flashlight mode. Everything in here was rusty and dirty. Ascending up, I half-expected the stairs to break under my weight. To say nothing of how oddly narrow the passage was. I needed to turn sideways just to keep from scraping the walls.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>At the top was a door that, of course, didn’t work. Half the doors in the maintenance tunnels didn’t work right, which was kind of ironic. I heard the officer’s voice echoing from the bottom of the stairs, radioing in for help. I pried the door open and emerged in a dusty room full of panels and a window looking out into the… whoa.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I went to the window and looked out at the </span>
  <em>
    <span>massive</span>
  </em>
  <span> vault door and the insane contraption of pistons that’d open it. It wasn’t that I’d never seen a vault door. Well, not in person. I’d seen all the old advertisements for vault 4. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Better living underground!</span>
  </em>
  <span> and all that. But I hadn’t really expected the door to be so massive in person.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I turned to the array of old computers and consoles. One of these had to open the door. But there were so many of them. How was I… oh yeah, VANS. I checked it and it led me to a console outside in the main vault entrance way.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There were mostly a series of identical posters on the walls. The first thing new residents would have seen once they entered. The posters looked old as dirt itself, faded and hard to make out. They depicted an attractive woman with lilac eyes and long, golden hair, save for the streaks of gray in it. From her generally fit build (and the fact one of her arms was a robotic proethic), I had to assume that was premature stress greying. I could empathize.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Vault 4—Together 4 Survival. Tomorrow 4 Victory,” her poster said. Another, smaller poster read, “Please form an orderly line to your right. Report unpatriotic talk to vault security.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Life wasn’t kind to her,” Ozpin said with a sigh. “But I’m glad she survived. Hers would be a vengeful ghost even I wouldn’t want to go up again.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Did you know her?” I mumbled.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Enough to know her mother would have begrudgingly been proud of her when it all ended.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Wish I could say the same,” I grumbled.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Don’t say that. You’re </span>
  <em>
    <span>trying</span>
  </em>
  <span>. You’re giving this all you’ve got. If that’s not something to be proud of, I don’t know what is.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I mumbled half-agreeably and returned my attention to the console and the massive door itself. My heart thumped in my throat. This was it. This. Was. </span>
  <em>
    <span>It</span>
  </em>
  <span>. There was no turning back from this. Hell, there’d been no turning back since the moment I tackled that security officer.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Once in school, I’d asked my teacher what the outside world was like. He told me “It probably doesn’t exist.” Because, “If there was a world outside, they would have contacted us by now. We’d know about them. And we’d be saving them.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My fingers hovered over the console. </span>
  <em>
    <span>RWBY4EVR</span>
  </em>
  <span>. Ozpin said the world outside existed. Said there was food out there. But the first thing he ever told me was that he wanted to escape the vault. I’d be lying if now, looking at the impossibly thick steel of the door, I didn’t wonder how much of me wanting to leave the vault was my own reasoning, and how much was all because I had a ghost in my head that kept telling me to. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>What if I opened the door and found my teacher was right. What if there </span>
  <em>
    <span>was</span>
  </em>
  <span> no outside world? Just an endless void that sucked all the air out of the vault like in that one holofilm about the cosmonauts. We wouldn’t even be able to sing Daisy Daisy as we died. All because my attempts to save the vault murdered everyone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No,” Hailee whispered. “No, no, </span>
  <em>
    <span>no</span>
  </em>
  <span>! Ozrick what are you doing?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m saving the vault,” I said, but it sounded forced even to myself.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You keep </span>
  <em>
    <span>saying</span>
  </em>
  <span> that, but what does it mean? You promised you’d tell me everything. But you’re not just running from, you’re running </span>
  <em>
    <span>to</span>
  </em>
  <span>.” She grit her teeth. For the first time, I really looked at her, and saw she was crying. “Ozrick, what are you doing?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I hesitated. “I’m leaving.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She grinned wide, an unhealthy expression; it was all teeth. “Ozrick, you’re not well. Something is </span>
  <em>
    <span>wrong</span>
  </em>
  <span>. You’re hurting people. You’re talking to yourself. And you’re </span>
  <em>
    <span>trying to leave</span>
  </em>
  <span>. You can’t do this. You can’t even open the door. I don’t know what’s wrong, but we can fix this. Whatever’s going on, I promised I’d be by your side. But you need to stop this.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>My throat was dry. I had to grab my wrists to keep them from shaking. The only words I managed were, “I know the door code.” Because of course that’s what I’d focus on.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You… oh my gods, you do, don’t you? You actually, you—you’d actually do it. You </span>
  <em>
    <span>are</span>
  </em>
  <span> doing it. You’re trying to leave the vault, your friends, </span>
  <em>
    <span>me</span>
  </em>
  <span>.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“If I stay, they’ll kill me,” I said, the words tumbling out like sand in my mouth.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You don’t know that!” she screamed. “Fuck, you’ll probably kill </span>
  <em>
    <span>them</span>
  </em>
  <span>!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Even holding my wrists, I couldn’t stop from shaking. “You… no, I wouldn’t do that. You know me, Hailee.”</span>
</p><p><span>She laughed. “Do I? </span><em><span>Do</span></em> <em><span>I</span></em><span>? I don’t know you at all anymore!”</span></p><p>
  <span>All I could do was stare at her. And try to steady my hands on the door console. R-W-B-Y-4-E-V-R. Enter.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The door mechanism moved to life. Old and unoiled, it squealed with metallic protest with every motion.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m the same boy I ever was, Hailee,” I said. “You’ll see. Come with me. I can’t go out there alone.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No!” she screamed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hailee, you promised you’d always be by me. I need you now more than ever!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You need fucking help!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Your help,” I said, uselessly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“A fucking shrink, maybe. Not me!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The pneumatic device pressed the back of the door. With a roar of metal like I’d ever heard before, it twisted. The massive gear-shaped door slowly rolled along its gear, slowly revealing a black morass beyond. For a moment, I thought it would suck me out. Rip the air from my lungs and boil me alive.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>As light from the vault poked out, I saw rock. A cave. A cave beyond the vault.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I turned to Hailee, only to find her crossbow extended on her arm. Pointed at me.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hailee?” I asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I promised I’d be by your side,” she said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hailee?” I repeated.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Maybe you think you’re saving the vault, Oz, but I’m saving you!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Hailee pulled the trigger.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I entered VATS and selected her. VATS moved me like a marionette, and I felt like I was having a first person out of body experience. I could almost imagine it wasn’t me targeting her at all.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The first punch destroyed her crossbolt. The second hit her hard enough in the gut that she coughed out a mix of spit and blood. It sprayed across my face in slow motion. VATS’ assessment of her health went from full to nearly empty. Hailee had never been good at taking a hit. She was team OCHR’s sniper for a reason.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I left VATS and reality came back. Bloody spit splashed my eyes and she flew backwards, hitting the ground hard. My HUD said she was still alive, but she wasn’t moving.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It took me a moment before I could move. “Hailee?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then they appeared, red dots on my HUD’s compass. Dozens and dozens of them. It had to be the reinforcements the officer had called for. But they were moving; I could check on Hailee and—</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Ozrick, I’m sorry, but you have to leave her!” Ozpin commanded.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“But she’s—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“If you don’t leave her, you’ll never be able to escape.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“But—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Run!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I took a hesitant step toward Hailee, and turned away from her for the last time. The vault door was already starting to roll to a close. Gunfire and shouts erupted from behind me as I ran. Away from the comforting lights of the vault into the infinite blackness of the outside world. Metal floor turned to slick stone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>With a final roar of metal, the massive door to Vault 4 closed behind me. And I was alone in the dark.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I ground to a halt, breathing so hard I needed to dry heave. My heart tried coming out my throat with it. I stumbled to the moist ground and just sat there, staring at nothing. So much nothing. So dark.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A wave of dizziness washed over me. Ozpin groaned from my mind. “Hey, kid.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Ozpin!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Kid, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been trying to hold it in. But, something’s wrong on my end too. Getting harder to talk without doing </span>
  <em>
    <span>this</span>
  </em>
  <span> to you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I started gagging. “Wha—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You made bad choices back there. And a lot of it’s because of me. I’m sorry. But there’s a good person in you somewhere. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Somewhere</span>
  </em>
  <span>. You can’t lose sight of it. “</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Are you leaving me?” I asked, coughing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No,” he whispered. “Just—I need to rest. The Godhammer was not kind to my soul anymore than it was to her. I don’t know what’s going on.” He paused. “Odds of us meeting were one in a million, because there’s only about one million people left.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What does that mean?” I demanded. It was a struggle to even sit up straight.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It means I’m proud of you, Ozrick. So very proud. There’s just one thing I need you to do for me. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Do better</span>
  </em>
  <span>.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And then he went quiet. Slowly, the sick feeling left.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Ozpin?” I asked softly</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nothing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hailee?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nothing. Of course.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Anyone?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I was alone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It started with laughter. Desperate and crazy. And in the end, I curled into a ball and cried. All the emotion I’d been burying to escape poured out at once.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I was alone. I was outside. Everyone was gone. Because I’d left them. I hadn’t even been able to say goodbye to my own mother.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>I wept and I wept until there was nothing left to cry.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Fallout: The Great and Terrible</b>
</p><p> </p><hr/><p>
  <em>
    <span>Level up!</span>
  </em>
</p><p><em><span>New Perk:</span></em> <b>Lady Killer</b><span> — </span><em><span>“Hey, everybody, did the news get around about a guy named Butcher Pete?”</span></em><span> — In combat, you do +15% damage against female opponents. Outside of combat, you’ll sometimes have access to unique dialogue options when dealing with the opposite sex. This extends to humans, ghouls, faunus, scorched, synths, and nephilim.</span></p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Volume 1, Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><strong>Chapter 3:</strong> Into the Wasteland</p>
<p>
  <em> “Then you must know most of the rules. Have a good day. And I’m sorry about calling you a bastard.” </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>     “ It’s gonna cause me some severe mental trauma.” </em>
</p>
<p>— 7 —</p>
<p>Alone.</p>
<p>There was no other word for it. For the first time in my life, I was truly alone. That’s not to say I’d always been within arm’s reach of someone. But vaults are cramped. Even when you couldn’t see anyone, odds were someone was only a couple yards away behind a wall or door or something.</p>
<p>This was different. The last traces of human life, of the world I knew, lie behind a yard-thick door of steel. Hailee had betrayed me. Ozpin wasn’t talking to me, getting some kind of rest. And all I had were these annoying things I called <em>my own thoughts</em> for company.</p>
<p>I wiped my fist of the last of the tears and stood up. VANS did nothing, probably because this wasn’t a “navmeshed map,” whatever that meant, so I didn’t have any guidance that way. I turned on my Pip-Boy light, set it to an “area lamp,” and just stared at the vault door. And the bones around it.</p>
<p>People. Human corpses. Old and musty. Just dead. One of them looked broken, like say from me stepping on it as I escaped the vault. I stumbled back, horrified. Had they been trying to get into the vault? It wasn’t that I’d never seen a corpse. I’d occasionally helped move out recently deceased residents. But like the loneliness I was feeling, this was different in a way I couldn’t exactly express.</p>
<p>There was nothing orderly or dignified about them. They had just died here and rotted to bones beneath the belly of Remnant.</p>
<p>The vault door itself looked like it’d once had a giant yellow 4 on it, but something had scratched it away. Long, deep claw marks scoured the metal, actually digging into the steel in more than a few places midway up the door. I didn’t want to meet whatever had done that.</p>
<p>Then again, as I turned around to see the collection of large, black eggs, I had a feeling I wouldn’t have a choice.</p>
<p>I raised my fists for a fight, looking around. I expected as soon as I saw the eggs, whatever horrible wasteland monster who laid them would jump at me from the shadows. That’s how it was in the old horror movies. But nothing happened, and my compass didn’t report any life. So, trying not to make any noise, I just left.</p>
<p>The cave tunnel leveled off in what looked like a basement. A big one with a couple ways to go. I chose a direction and eventually found a rope leading up. Was I in a well? I took Coach Yarrow’s gym lessons to mind and hiked up the rope.</p>
<p>I climbed out, rolled over the edge of the well, looked up into the sky, and the sudden sinking feel I felt made me vomit.</p>
<p>Above me was, well, it <em>just went on and on</em>. This endless <em>space</em>. There was no other word for it. <em>Space</em>. At least there was a ceiling, this thick layer of clouds that let through no light. I knew what they were intellectually. I’d seen the sky in movies. I’d seen the night in old pictures. I used to think the vault’s central Atrium was huge and tall, but this?</p>
<p>It was too real. I collapsed onto my ass, head swimming.</p>
<p>I looked out and saw a light. For a moment I thought I was going to see my very first dawn, but the color was wrong. On the horizon through the trees was just this unearthly green glow. It looked radioactive. Just this vaguely pulsating green glow from far, far away.</p>
<p><em>Is that the sun</em>? I thought. When I looked up to the sky, I realized I couldn’t see the moon. There was supposed to be a moon, a broken celestial body with a storm of broken shards around it. But there was nothing.</p>
<p>No moon, no sun. Had the bombs destroyed them? Maybe my old teacher had been partly right. Atomic balefire hadn’t destroyed Remnant; it had destroyed Heaven instead. The implication was terrifying in a way I could barely process.</p>
<p>So I just did the next best thing and tried not to think of it.</p>
<p>As the brief nausea passed, I began to truly take stock of the world. A world that smelled wet and musty and dusty and a host of their scents I didn’t have words for. The ground, too, was uneven in a subtle way that drove me mad. Nothing like the perfectly flat floors of the vault. The field I was on ended in the shape of trees. Actual trees. I’d seen fake ones during the Vytal Festival, when the sports arena’s floor shifted to simulate terrain.</p>
<p>In fact, the outside was a lot like a less sterile Vytal stadium. And all of it casting the faintest of shadow from that unearthly green glow.</p>
<p>Looking away from it, I saw distant hills and even mountains. Lots of trees, which surprised me. At least until I thought I saw far darker patches iup in the distance that might have been red or, more likely, old burns. The local area around the vault must not have been hit directly. Speaking of, past the old well, was the remnant of a large house. I got to my feet and approached.</p>
<p>My Pip-Boy started flashing and vibrating. I checked it out with a touch. On its own it took me to the “CCTS Automap” tab. I vaguely recognized where I was on a map it labeled as “The Patchwork Wasteland.” Even weirder, it had assigned a label to my current location. “Dad’s House.”</p>
<p>What?</p>
<p>I touched it. “Delete custom label?” it asked, and I accepted. Dad’s House instantly relabeled to “Xiao Long House.” Maybe this was all pre-war leftover data? I tapped a nearby location on the map and tried to use VANS to navigate there. I didn’t see glowing paths in the air. There went that idea. Useless fucking software.</p>
<p>I entered Xiao’s House. Whatever I’d been expecting, I should have been prepared to be let down. The entire place was a dump. Every window broken. None of the lights working. And what looked like a den of small animals in the mushy remains of a couch. Oddly, there was an old bottle of alcohol in the fish-smelling fridge I didn’t dare touch.</p>
<p>Opening a door on the second floor startled an animal. It cawed with angry surprise and darted out the window. It was more and more proof just how alive things were in the Wasteland. Which meant it was entirely possible there were farming communities out here who’d be interested in trading with Vault 4.</p>
<p>The room the bird had been roosting in smelled like mom after a long night. Probably had something to do with the pile of glass bottles in one corner of the room. The books in the shelves were all mushy ruins. But the computer on the desk was in working order. Out of curiosity, I hit the power button, and it actually powered on. I tried not to think why that was.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, it had a password on it, and I hadn’t the foggiest idea how to crack it. I knew that Pip-Boys had a tool in them to help unlock computers, but that was as far as my super hacker knowledge went.</p>
<p>Well, no, hold on. I was smart enough to figure this out. Because for some reason, someone’s private computer from over a century ago was remaining locked was a direct challenge to me. I tapped through the Pip-Boy until I found a section called “Technical Manuals.” I found the right chord and pulled it out of the Pip-Boy, and instantly a Vault-Tec tutorial popped in front of my eyes.</p>
<p>The gist was that the Pip-Boy could be used to unlock computers of “similar operating systems.” It was a little complex, but once I plugged the wire into the computer and ran the program, a list of words appeared on the computer. The tutorial ended with “Remember! Hacking into unauthorized computers is extremely illegal and Vault-Tec is not responsible for any/all executions you may experience.”</p>
<p>Nice.</p>
<p>After playing the weird unlocking game, I got the password. STRQ. It’d been a lot harder to figure out than I had realized. But still, fuck yeah! Look at me, I was a regular hacking genius!</p>
<p>A genius who was currently cripplingly alone in a world that had no sun and took half an hour to figure out four fucking letters. But I had to take my victories somewhere.</p>
<p>I looked around the computer. The internet didn’t work, nor did the program that adjusted the lights throughout the house. The only thing of note was a hidden exe located in a folder called “Porn” that remotely opened a safe. The old frame of a painting slid open. Inside I found some old pre-war money and miscellaneous personal effects, like a golden locket, inside which was a photo of a woman with silver eyes. I pocketed it and anything else that looked valuable, figuring maybe someone might want to trade for them.</p>
<p>“Hey Ozpin,” I said, “do you know who lived here? Or the woman in the photo?”</p>
<p>“Yes.” His voice sounded like someone smoked an entire warehouse of cigarettes. “I’m just remembering peaceful days. One last little indulgence.” After a heady, slightly sobbing breath, he fell silent.</p>
<p>“Ozpin?” I asked, feeling dizzy again. In the way his presence has been causing lately.</p>
<p>“If you wish to sell it, I have no objections. The Wasteland is filled with precious memories nobody remembers. I have mine, and if it puts food in your stomach, I’m sure Summer wouldn’t mind.”</p>
<p>I bit down my nauseous bile. “The girl in the locket?”</p>
<p>Ozpin didn’t reply.</p>
<p>Gradually the sick feeling faded, and with it all traces of Ozpin.</p>
<p>I thought of his last words to me in the vault. <em>Do better</em>. So that meant it was okay to raid and pilfer from the dead?</p>
<p>That fucker better <em>get better</em> and start talking again.</p>
<p>I sighed and left Xiao Long House, then spent maybe another twenty minute looking around my CCTS Automap. Even though it said I was in the Patchwork Wasteland, I knew enough history to know that I should have been on the island of Patch. Aside from my current location only general areas were labeled. Highway 17, Ville-de-Cap, Hearthholme. Trying to scroll too wide or away from the island I was on resulted in the map going fuzzy beyond readability. The furthest east I could go was a smaller island in the ocean called “J.O.C. Castlereagh.”</p>
<p>Still, vaguely east was the way I figured I should head. My current location seemed fairly isolated in the highlands of Patch. If I was going to find anyone out there, they’d probably be that way.</p>
<p>— 8 —</p>
<p>Bloodhound.</p>
<p>How my Pip-Boy knew what to call the monster, I didn’t know. Sure, it looked hound-like. But it was all wrong. It had a second upper jaw, making it look like it was wearing his own face as a helmet. Much of its chest and torso were bare of skin, just this raw, occasionally bleeding flayed skin. And a couple spikes here and there behind its knees. Because no mutant creature was complete without them.</p>
<p>It howled at me before charging. I threw myself out of the way and punched the bloody gap that was its chest. The pneumatic press shot it backwards. VATS thought that’d done dcent, but not much damage. It got to its claws, snarled, and charged.</p>
<p>I lowered myself to grapple. Back in the Vault, there’d been a rival of mine, Johnny ‘the Bull.” Biggest, meanest fucker in the Vault. He did this, charged and tried to beat his opponents down. It worked too, until Couch Yarrow taught me about centers of gravity. How to use momentum and weigh against your opponent.</p>
<p>So when the bloodhound reached me, its working jaws snapping, I pushed forwards and grabbed it. Extending my legs, I turned its momentum against it and flipped it over. Dogs, apparently, don’t handle being pinned very well. I punched and punched and beat until its head was a bloody pulp.</p>
<p>It was oddly easy when to kill a monster when it was trying to kill you. I’d think I’d have more reservations, but fight-or-flight has a way of ignoring morals. Still, looking at its mangled face, I had to think that this was the first thing I’d ever killed. I should have been more horrified or maybe excited. Instead, I just felt a little winded.</p>
<p>The bloodhound didn’t have much of a coat. And in any case I didn’t know how to skin animals. I only mention this because I’d played the Wasteland RPG. Years ago some nerds in maintenance had coded a little text adventure game that, by now, had wound up on every PC in the vault. One of the keys to win the game was to steal everything that wasn’t nailed down or on fire. And then later on you got a crowbar and fire extinguisher.</p>
<p>Sure, this was reality, not a game, but c’mon. This was the Wasteland. Scavenging and hunting had to be important parts of how the world worked.</p>
<p>That’s why I was out this way, in fact. Not long after leaving Xiao Long House I got an alert on my Pip-Boy. A new radio station that was little more than an old emergency broadcast. “...’re located near Rochelle Road. This is Lance Sergeant Kholichev, Royal Army Medical Corps. If anyone’s still out there, we’ve established ourselves near Rochelle Road and are ready to try to provide aid. Again, we’re located near Rochelle Road.” It repeated like that, and probably had been for the last century and a half.</p>
<p>I tuned to the radio to track its origin. Apparently the Pip-Boy could do that. There were also a couple other radio signals I’d never noticed until now, two of which even had names, “RAIDIO” and “Valean News Radio.” I wasn’t interested in listening to old pre-war static, so I didn’t bother tuning into them.</p>
<p>Every step I took, I kept thinking of how this forest was like the woodlands terrain from the Vytal Stadium. Except the grass was real. The moss was real. The chilly wind wasn’t from someone setting the AC too high. And the subtle unevenness of it was still driving me mad. It felt like the outside world was slanted at a slight angle, like the bombs had tipped the world over after they destroyed the heavens.</p>
<p>Just ask that green glow that you couldn’t escape. I only managed to avoid destroying my shins in the darkness through the use of my Pip-Boy light.</p>
<p>The camp the broadcast was coming from was, predictably, a complete wreck. The Army had built it out from a crashed medical bullhead, turning a small field into a wrecked tent city. My Pip-Boy indicated it had marked this location as the “Royal Army Emergency Relief Camp.” How the hell could it tell that? Maybe the radio beacon indicated that. Which made sense.</p>
<p>Everything stopped when I saw the radio antenna. It was a tower of a couple yards height, the dishes mostly broken or shot through. What got me was the body tied to the metal, splayed out and missing several chunks like someone had been periodically carving at it with a knife.</p>
<p>I walked towards it in a daze. In a way, this was my first sign of human life, dead though it was. <em>It</em>. No, that was wrong. This had been a person. Someone <em>alive</em>, and not long ago. One the one hand, it meant people were alive in the area. On the other, someone had done this.</p>
<p>A gun cocked behind me. I whirled, four figures coming up red on my HUD. People. Actual living people! Just not friendly ones. Each of them carried a weapon, and looked to be wearing hide armor. I think I saw bloodhound fur on the man in the center. I shone my light on them, and they covered their eyes. Oddly red eyes. Not in the sense of their irises, but the rest of their eyes. Somewhere between a lack of sleep and an eye infection.</p>
<p>The one in the center of the group pointed a gun at me. “Lower that right fucking now!”</p>
<p>There was something off in his voice. A little too eager and frenzied. I did as asked</p>
<p>He whistled. “Good. Now, I can’t believe the radio actually worked for something!”</p>
<p>“Uh, hello,” I said.</p>
<p>“Did anyone ask you?” a female barked, holding a spear made from an old flag. The girl didn’t seem able to hold still, almost shifting from one foot to another. Something was wrong with her hair, almost a kind of mange. A patch of her skin there was all red and raw, a little like the bloodhound.</p>
<p>The man in the center waved his gun. “Shut up, shut up!” His friends started fanning out around me in a sloppy squad tactic that seemed more instinctual than trained.</p>
<p>I had flashbacks of kindergarten in the vault. A young Hailee, standing there, forcing a smile as the other children started surrounding her. Mocking her. Making her cry. I’d stepped in to defend her, and gotten my ass beaten for my efforts. Afterwards when she asked me why I helped, I panicked, and said, “Because I wanna be a Huntsman hero.”</p>
<p>Well, here I was. A Huntsman for real this time. And here were the Wasteland bullies.</p>
<p>“Look, we were almost asleep and already ate. So here’s a deal. Your bag. Hand over everything and I promise to give you a five minute head start running.”</p>
<p>A man with a broken set of glasses frowned. “So, you want us to chase him. Fuck that, Raph.”</p>
<p>Raph hissed. “Don’t you take this from me! I’ve always wanted to use that line.”</p>
<p>“But I don’t want to do no more running,” he whined.</p>
<p>Raph sighed deeply. “Alright, dickhead. Blame this guy here for why we’re just gonna shoot you here.”</p>
<p>These people were bullies. Same as in the vault. I’d learned a long time ago that you couldn’t negotiate with bullies. The only thing you could do was punch until either you kicked their asses or they realized you were more trouble than it was worth.</p>
<p>But these people were armed. They had guns. <em>Real</em> guns. I’d only gone up against Huntsman practice firearms. I couldn’t just rush into this. Even if I was doubtlessly the better fighter.</p>
<p>The girl with the flagpole spear whistled. “Hey, look at him.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, I see. Big guy. Lots of meat.”</p>
<p>She sniffed. “No, I mean, <em>look</em>. Fucker actually looks like he’s taken a bath.”</p>
<p>“Oh course I have,” I said, trying to act more confident than I felt. And bluffing with every word. “Man as important as me needs to look presentable.”</p>
<p>He scoffed. “And who exactly are you that I should give a fuck?”</p>
<p>“My buddies are just a little ways behind me. I’m just a scout for the Man.”</p>
<p>He hesitated. “Ashe or the Odious King?”</p>
<p>“Ashe,” I said quickly, gambling on the name. “Put the guns away and I’ll forget all about this and let you all live.”</p>
<p>“What’s he doing this deep inland?” Raph asked a little nervously.</p>
<p>I snorted a laugh. “I’m a Huntsman. I slay monsters. Do the math.”</p>
<p>Raph blinked and squinted. “A what?” Aiming his gun at me, he took a step closer. I suddenly felt extremely unlucky at the look he got in his reddened eyes. He laughed. “Oh my gods I almost fell for it. Godsdamn! Nice story, dipshit, but you don’t look like an Ashen. That’s a fucking <em>vault</em> suit. A fucking vault suit!”</p>
<p>“Clean and a vault suit?” Poledance interjected, hopping in place. “He’s from a vault. Actual vault! The King’ll pay très bad for him.”</p>
<p>This wasn’t about to go well at all.</p>
<p>“Fuck that, he’d make us royalty if we gave him a fresh vault!” Raph chastised.</p>
<p>“He’s bound to have meds. We can fix Poledancer up,” Glasses added.</p>
<p>Raph had Lien signs signing in his infected eyes. “Yeah! We don’t gotta be raiders no more. We can be <em>people</em>. Lioux, Poledance, tie him up. And try not to sample the merchandise.”</p>
<p>Now’s my chance. I set my Pip-light to max and turned it onto right in Raph’s face. He screamed in surprise. Like the frantic Lizzy back in the vault, he opened fire, the shots going wild.</p>
<p>I entered VATS and targeted Poledance. At the slight angle she’d been coming at me from, jerking to throw a punch at her felt like being slung around by a layer of subcutaneous chickenwire.</p>
<p>Instead of coming at me, she dug her spear shaft into the ground and polevaulted up. My punch went right under her. She landed behind me and thrust into my back.</p>
<p><em>Pain</em>. Her taped-together knives stabbed through my jacket, through my vault suit, and into my flesh. I’d been hurt before. Beaten and bloodied. But never skewered. This wasn’t a competition in a vault. <em>This was real</em>.</p>
<p>The reality made it feel fake, somehow, in a way I couldn’t articulate.</p>
<p>I spun to grab the spear. The motion ripped out a chunk of my back. I jerked the spear to the side; she held on and came with. A pneumatic punch sent her flying into a tent. I took the spear and threw at the hitherto quiet raider, whose silence ended with a scream just like mine.</p>
<p>Lioux shot me through the knee with his pistol. I collapsed onto the ground. My HUD flashed a “crippled left leg” warning, as if I didn’t already fucking know.</p>
<p>“Fuck the King, no one hurts Poledance!” he screamed, taking aim.</p>
<p>I punched the open air to my side; the pneumatic force launched me to the side, dodging the wild spray of bullets. I instinctively tried to stop my roll with my leg, my crippled leg. Something popped in the wreckage of my knee.</p>
<p>The white hot pain blinded me. But Lioux kept shooting. “Empty, fuck!” he shouted.</p>
<p>Unable to see, I turned my fists around and blasted myself backwards towards the sound of his voice. I hit paydirt, tackling him into a wall into him like Conrad Sunbleach. He beat his heavy pistol against my head, bashing until I could see stars through the white hot nothing.</p>
<p>I rammed my elbow into his face and he went out. We both fell down together</p>
<p>“That’s. Fucking. Enough,” Raph said in a cold voice, cocking his rifle.</p>
<p>I aimed my Pip-Boy at him to blind him. He shot a bullet clean through my shoulder.</p>
<p>“Aura!” I screamed, trying to think of Hailee. Of Vault 4. Trying to make the shield glowing power thing pop up. “Ozpin!”</p>
<p>Nothing happened.</p>
<p>His gun clicked. “Aw, fucking piece of shit,” he hissed, fuddling with a jam.</p>
<p>I tried to pull up VATS, but it just told me insufficient Aura Points. I reached out until I found the wall of a vehicle, and used it to steady myself to my one good foot. My left arm hung limpy at my side. I blinked until I could see Raph through the pain.</p>
<p>He pulled back the rifle’s slide and aimed the gun at me. He opened fire without hesitation. I opened the valves on my working fist and expelled all the air forwards, blasting the hail of lead to the side. I leaned forward and lamely hopped towards him, tackling into him. We rolled to the ground together like me and Conrad Sunbleach.</p>
<p>Raph shoved the riflebutt at my face, smashing <em>something</em>. I spat blood and mucus onto his face. With a press on my other gauntlet, I shot the last of my compressed air into his face. His head bounced back onto the ground, stunning him long enough to wrestle the rifle away.</p>
<p>Then there I was, atop a man, pointing a loading gun in his face. My one-armed grip was all shake, no steady.</p>
<p>Raph stared at me, teeth grit. “Do it!” he barked. “Pull the trigger. Fucking do it, you coward!”</p>
<p>He was right.</p>
<p>And I couldn’t do it. I tried. Felt the trigger. Knew it’d be an easy press. But it’d murder a man.</p>
<p>In the vault, I’d hurt people. Even before I smashed in Lizzy’s face. My entire life had been to attack, lead the charge, and win against my fellow Huntsmen at any cost. You couldn’t afford to hesitate. I’d broken bones, but never killed anyone.</p>
<p><em>All you do is hurt people</em>.</p>
<p>Lizzy, bleeding, glass in her face, but alive. Hailee, lying on the floor of the vault entryway, ribs broken. Poledancer, smashed into a tent. Silent bully, currently struggling with the spear in his gut. Lioux, beaten to a pulp.</p>
<p>Hurt. Most of them badly. But no one was dead.</p>
<p>Now here I was, a real rifle in a real man’s face.</p>
<p>
  <em>Do better.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>I’m trying, Ozpin!</em>
</p>
<p>Raph didn’t give me the chance to spare him. He pulled a pistol from beneath himself. I blew his brains out before he had the chance. The recoil wrenched the gun from my hands.</p>
<p>I slid off his lifeless corpse, suddenly deeply aware of just how much everything hurt. How much I was bleeding. Everything else was numb.</p>
<p>I looked around the Royal Army’s trashed medical camp and started to drag myself. My knee seemed to catch on everything. My bleeding back soaked my entire chest hot and sticky. I considered trying to find the raiders and finish them off. Because if I didn’t know, they might come back to kill me. But I couldn’t do that. There was a difference between killing in self defense, and double-tapping the wounded.</p>
<p>And even if there wasn’t, I had to believe it was true.</p>
<p>So I crawled. I bled. I fought through the pain blindness until I was within the center of the camp, the crashed bullhead dropship. Until I found what I was looking for. An old locked box with a pink cross on it. Given all the knife marks on it, Poledancer had been trying to hack into it for a while.</p>
<p>I grabbed the lock, braced myself with my good foot, and pulled and pulled upon the box, bending it enough to get my hand inside. I managed to pull out two stick metal syringes equipped with pressure gauges. My Pip-Boy marked them as “stale.” But they’d get the job done.</p>
<p>I injected the first into my leg and depressed the plunger. The next into my arm. Instantly the wonders of pre-war science set my wounds on fire. It was like a thousand ants crawling in my injuries, rebuilding my flesh cell-by-cell.</p>
<p>Finally, mercifully, I passed out there on the floor of the old dropship. Maybe I’d die here. Maybe I’d wake up in chains. I was too tired and hurt to care.</p>
<p>The unforgiving light of the sun would wake me up in any case.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>--</p>
<p>
  <em>Level up!</em>
</p>
<p><em>New Perk:</em><strong> Pugilist </strong>— <em>“Float like a bumblebee, sting like a Death Stalker”  </em>— You sure know how to think on your fists! Gain +25% Movement from the recoil or similar abilities from unarmed weapons.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Volume 1, Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><strong>Chapter 4</strong>: Sunflowers</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“One day, it will be my job to save the world. But I still have a lot left to learn.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>— 9 —</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Sunlight!</p>
<p>When I was a boy, my teacher took our class to hydroponics. He told us that plants needed nutrients and sunlight to grow. That, once upon a time, all life on Remnant came from a giant ball of fire in the sky. It seemed unlikely. I’d seen the lights in hydroponics, and they were just too bright for me. Nothing could actually <em>want</em> to live life blinded by light like that.</p>
<p>The sun put hydroponics to shame. The light washed into my eyes from a hole in the ceiling. I shot up, feeling for my wounds. My outfit was torn and shot up, the wounds replaced with dim scars. Nothing had killed me in the night. But the light outside was trying to.</p>
<p>I stumbled outside the makeshift tent and just stared. The giant ball of fire hidden behind the neverending clouds. Even through them, I could feel it. I couldn’t even look at it. It was warm in a way like air wasn’t. Warm air was all around you. You submerge yourself in it and heated up evenly.</p>
<p>The sun didn’t play those rules. It picked one spot, one direction, and <em>burned</em>. My skin, which now looked genuinely pale for the first time in my life, tingled in the light. I felt oddly self conscious of myself and I wished I’d brought a hat.</p>
<p>And if that wasn’t enough, the outside was <em>loud</em>. Almost as loud as the lowest levels of the vault, where workers and protectrons busily worked bigger more space to expand the vault. What at first I thought was a broken air conditioner was actually the drone of insects. <em>Insects</em>! I’d seen the holofilm about the giant radioactive ants, and the fact that surface bugs were still, well, bug-sized was amazing. I just wish they weren’t so loud. Same with the occasional birdsong, the avian version of “ayo, let’s fuck” that pre-war people seemed to enjoy. I wondered if any of them were changelings birds, come to lay their eggs in Raph’s corpse like flies and their maggots.</p>
<p>I found myself having to squint as I explored the camp. My shoulder and knee still hurt from the gunshot wounds, but they worked. That was all that mattered. According to my Pip-Boy—which I could only read when I held my hand between it and a sun—the leg and arm were still in a bad way. It recommended I find an actual doctor or risk permanent injury.</p>
<p>Weirdly, the image displaying an assessment of my health was a chibi girl wearing an armored bikini and a determined smile on her face. I poked around and found out it was a custom mod the previous user had installed called “HuntsGal.” I set it back to the default Vault Boy.</p>
<p>In any case, I couldn’t find the bullies, or raiders as they called themselves. All except for the man I murdered. He lay there, baking in the sun. I had expected he’d be festering, bloated, filled to the bring with maggots and changelings, but no. He was just there. A small hole in his cheek and a puddle of dried gray matter on the rock under him.</p>
<p>I felt a lot of things, looking at him. Most of which was how I felt I should be feeling more. Maybe sympathy or regret or a host of angsty things. I’d shot a man point-blank in the face, then crawled away. And all I could do here was stare at him.</p>
<p>And steal his rife. Mine now, fucker.</p>
<p>Black carbon with white wood paneling, my Pip-Boy called it an FT-13 assault carbine. “Scan weapon?” it asked. Curiously, I pointed my Pip-Boy’s camera at it. A moment later it added stats to the weapon, rechristening it “Heartbreaker” after the scratched-in name on the barrel. It fired 6.8mm rounds and was in generally horrible condition. The Pip-Boy actually suggested I break it down to make a splint for my leg.</p>
<p>The gun was one thing, a good few feet away from his body, where I’d dropped it. But actually searching the dirty, fur-wearing man’s body? That was another thing. It’d seemed so tame in the videogame. Press button, see list of things, grab what you want. It was a different manner to hunker down, take in the smell of death and shit, and start feeling through his outfit like a cross between a pickpocket and a public groper.</p>
<p>His dead eyes seemed to follow me. Probably because I was moving his body. But every time I looked, he was staring at me with that corpse-hollow expression.</p>
<p>I was only able to find a handful of bullets on Raph’s body. And some food I deeply worried came from the carved up corpse on the radio antenna. Speaking of, I found the switch to the antenna and shut it down. I slung Heartbreaker over my shoulder and just looked over the camp.</p>
<p>“So. This is the Wasteland, Ozpin?”</p>
<p>I thought I might have felt a hint of nauseous at the edges of my perception, but maybe it was all in my head. In any case he didn’t reply. Without a need for it, my HUD vanished. My eyes were mine and mine alone once more.</p>
<p>I picked through the rest of the Royal Medical camp, but in the century or so since the world ended, I was far from the first person here. The only thing I could find were scraps of old combat armor. I used my needle and thread to stitch them to the holes in my Huntsman armor.</p>
<p>Hardly armor, really. Decent in the vault, but nothing compared to a firearm. A weighted vault suit and a brown, lightly armored jacket with a big 4 on the back. The scraps of armor weren’t a perfect fit, weren’t even the right color, but they patched up the holes. I’d sewn and stitched this all together. I knew all about fixing and maintaining gear. I didn’t, however, know how to clean the blood out.</p>
<p>Didn’t know a lot of practical Wasteland skills, I figured.</p>
<p>I pulled up my Pip-Boy map and tried to figure out where I was. From there, it was back towards the general direction of civilization. Or what was once civilization. What the map said used to be towns and cities.</p>
<p>— 10 —</p>
<p>It wasn’t a subtle shift. A vague kind of forest dotted with old homesteads slowly gave way to a bog, which rapidly gave way to sunflowers.</p>
<p>Just, like, sunflowers. There was a line between the marsh and the flowers, like two armies marching to battle each other. Facing off.</p>
<p>But it was just sunflowers.</p>
<p>Granted, some looked big, but it was like a storybook image from an old children’s book. I recalled vaguely that sunflower seeds were edible, though I had no idea how to collect or prepare them. Trying to pull apart the sunflowers for anything worth eating gave me a trivial amount of radiation.</p>
<p>Idly, as I walked into the sunflower grove, I kept using the pumps on my gloves, charging up more pneumatic pressure. I’d used up everything fighting the raiders. And while it was possibly to do it manually, the vault had a machine that recharged them for me. It only got harder trying to walk while doing it.</p>
<p>The sunflowers didn’t end. Some of them looked like small trees instead of just sunflowers. But that was another thing. No trees. No bushes. No grass, either. And quiet, too. Originally I thought the relief from the bugs and birds was nice. It’d taken me hours to finally be able to tune the noises out. And soon as I had, it was gone, and that was noticeable.</p>
<p>Out in the real world, in the outside, everything was loud. I finally understood the cliche “quiet, too quiet.” It just felt off, like how flat ground outside <em>still wasn’t level.</em></p>
<p>But nothing jumped out. VATS never found targets. And in any case, my Pip-Boy didn’t even detect signs of life. Just signs of death. I came across the crashed ruins of a commercial airship, this massive, sleek thing of metal at the end of a massive furrow of blasted dirt. I’d always wondered what it’d be like to fly in one of those metal birds. Well, to fly in general. But after seeing just how <em>tall</em> the sky was, I had a hard time imagining myself up there without somehow falling off the world.</p>
<p>I had to be careful not to look too far up, else I’d stumble to the ground. Had to keep my gaze more or less level with the horizon. Too easy to get vertigo.</p>
<p>In any case, I wasn’t the first person to find the airship. Some weird artist was. All around it was a garden of human statues, save for a pair with bird-like crests atop their heads. They were all either laying pathetically on the ground or walking around, hands to their face like they were weeping. They had these weird crystals sticking out of them that looked like Dust. My Pip-Boy said they were highly radioactive, so I avoided them and moved on.</p>
<p>Know what I found? Sunflowers! This was turning into an entire biome. I found an entire neighborhood overrun by the sunflowers. I stopped by the only building still mostly standing and found several cups of Rocket Noodles in the old fridge. Hello, lunch!</p>
<p>After trying to figure out how it worked, I pulled the clearly-labeled “Pull” string at the bottom of the cup, and the magic of technology (and a little fire Dust, I suspected) instantly heated the cup up. I pulled off the paper lid and helped myself to beef-flavored ramen.</p>
<p>The first bite hurt. Not because or because my Pip-Boy said it was radioactive (only trivially so), but because I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. Stimpaks didn’t work by magic. They took something from you to work. I’d been so hungry I couldn’t feel it anymore. By the time I crawled back up to the table, the noodles were merely warm. I had to force them down.</p>
<p>There was a poster on the wall split down the center. On the left was a bloody crown on the snowy ground, with a cheering crowd of disfigured and ugly individuals behind it. To the right, a happy and very much non-mutated family enjoying dinner, the flag of Vale behind them on the wall. “The rule of the Mob, or <em>Freedom</em>?” the poster asked.</p>
<p>Another showed an eerily familiar scene of food lines that made me swallow a sudden lump in my throat. One woman with a cart of food, and another woman with a hungry, crying baby, no food in her cart. “Rationing means a fair share for <span class="u">everyone</span>,” it claimed.</p>
<p>“I thought there was always plenty of food before the War,” I said.</p>
<p>To my surprise, Opin stirred. “The basic fact of Remnant is that space is at a premium,” he said sadly, and I had to bite my tongue to keep my food down. Stupid psychic ghost nausea. “The most successful societies were always those who could best use their space to grow crops and raise families. As a species, we were never particularly good at that. There’s not enough space for this many people. Not enough space for humans and faunus.<em> Not enough space for two systems of government</em>.”</p>
<p>“That’s not fair,” I said. “Republicanism destroyed the world. Everyone knows that.”</p>
<p>Ozpin sighed sadly at me. “Does it really matter?”</p>
<p>“You gotta, like, you gotta learn history so you don’t repeat it,” I countered. “They said it all the time in school.”</p>
<p>I felt a longing feeling in my guts that didn’t come from myself. “Once upon a time, there was a boy born into a dying species. ‘I remembered the world as it was, and I won’t repeat its mistakes.’ His beloved at his side and sword in hand, he conquered the world with the power of love. He built a Final Empire on the backs of slavery and human suffering to usher in paradise. ‘I will be cruel to be kind,’ he told himself. ‘They suffer now, but it’ll all get better,’ he lied to himself. Lied to himself until the truth of what he did killed him.</p>
<p>“Once upon a time,” he went on, and I found myself hypnotized, “there was a prince born into a dying kingdom. His beloved standing against him and the Crown Atomic in hand, he trampled his people and sundered his foes with the power of righteous intentions. ‘This time will be different; I have learned from history better than anyone. I will be cruel to be kind,’ he told himself. ‘But only temporarily, for only I know how best to lead people, only I can save the world,’ he lied to himself. Lied to himself until his heart gave it, and the monsters he created unchained themselves upon the world.</p>
<p>“Once upon a time,” he said, voice growing hoarse, “there was a Huntsman born into a dying world. ‘I have done evil to be kind,’ he said with remorse. ‘And I have learned my lesson. I will never again let it happen. But I will stop my wicked beloved at any cost. I will not dominate people. I will lead from the shadows. I will train the next generation of pure-hearted heroes with but a single phrase, <em>Do Better</em>. Better than I was.’ He looked upon his students with pride. ‘I will tell them only what they must know, so they do the right thing of their own free will,’ he lied. ‘I will never repeat my mistakes. I will only be cruel to kind until these true heroes inherit this world from me.’</p>
<p>“Once upon a time,” he said with an air of defeated finality, “the world ended. This Huntsman, this prince, this <em>boy</em> who remembered all of history, became nothing more than the radioactive ashes of good intentions.”</p>
<p>He fell silent, and I found myself facedown on the kitchen table, struggling with my stomach.</p>
<p>— 11 —</p>
<p>I left the house out the front door. Which was harder than you’d think. The door had a knob, which I understood in theory, but had never actually used. All doors in the vault opened vertically. I wrestled with the knob, turning it the wrong way so hard I actually tore it off.</p>
<p>But hey, good news. Without the knob, doors just push open.</p>
<p>I kept the metal doorknob in case I’d need it.</p>
<p>My triumph over the front door lasted shortly. The houses were built one of those circular dead-end things. Cul-de-sacs, I think. I’d entered this one because it was the only one still standing, so on the way in I’d failed to see the actual cul-de-sac itself.</p>
<p>The cracked concrete looked burned; the sunflowers that had perched within the cracks were little more than ash. In their place were wooden coffins. I counted thirteen, arrayed mostly in pairs circularly around what looked like a pile of old cars at the center of the cul-de-sac, complete with a field antenna.</p>
<p>I drew Heartbreaker and dove behind a coffin, wary that this was another raider trap whose broadcast I missed. When no one attacked me, I slowly put the gun away and opened a coffin.</p>
<p>A man stared back at me. Or rather, some weird robotic mannequin. It looked like one of the animatronics the vault used to teach history class, except without any of the paint or character those had. This was just a metal skeleton with thick, rubbery-feeling skin, dressed to half-assedly resemble a person. It looked like it’d been out here a long time. The metal I saw was rusted, and one of its arms didn’t even really attach. There was a pool of some oily liquid at the foot of the coffin.</p>
<p>With the mannequin was this strange boxy thing with a visible microdust cell. It looked like a toy gun, all white plastic. I wrestled with the cell and managed to pull it out, figuring the pretend mannequin had no need for it. Dust, once the cornerstone of all advanced technology in its myriad forms, was near nonexistent in Vault 4. Who knew what this bit of electrodust could help with.</p>
<p>I closed the coffin and wandered into the little car camp. Sitting at the center of the car fort was what I first mistook as a crumple up car. But it was too blooded. And had arms and legs. <em>Power armor!</em> I realized with a sudden wave of excitement. Except it wasn’t like any power armor I’d seen in the old posters or films.</p>
<p>It was mostly white, with the armor of its upper chest a cautionary red. Which was where the armor ended. The armored chest came up to its head, giving it a headless trash-can like appearance. It was holding what looked like one of those toy guns, except with one that was much larger. A heavy machine gun. I tried to poke at it, but his dead man grip held the gun. And touching it prompted my Pip-Boy to inform me “Weapon possesses incompatible Aura/Gene lock.” I didn’t know what that meant, but I figured the gun wouldn’t work for me</p>
<p>The only other interesting thing about the man in the armor was that most of the guts were missing. Probably should have led with that.</p>
<p>It looked like something had torn into the armor and ripped out as much of the human inside as possible. Blood stained the white of the armor and much of the concrete around it. The fact that part of a person was still inside it is what confirmed this was power armor. Because, y’know, someone was wearing it as armor.</p>
<p>The old propaganda depicted power armor as invincible men in walking tanks, carrying huge weapons, mowing down hordes of Vale’s enemies. So I had to wonder what could crack this one open like a tin can.</p>
<p>Maybe power armor wasn’t actually that good. To be honest, I didn’t know much about it. There’s only been one suit in the vault, and it was a construction model. Useful as a mobile command suit for operating robots and heavy lifting. I’d never actually seen it, though. That kind of work took place in levels of the vault civilians weren’t allowed.</p>
<p>Nearby was a computer plugged into the antenna. Like Xiao Long’s computer, it must have been battery-powered, because it turned on. And after just a bit of password cracking (which I was getting better at), I got to the desktop. The password was “p@ssword,” by the way.</p>
<p>Entry 1: “It is o’clock. The date is about today. Jackasses sent me into the Sunflower Barrens, literally the emptiest place in the world, with nothing but the world’s shittiest hosts. I may have stolen some PA because I don’t want to die whenever the next pollen season erupts. Till then, I’m building a radio thing for reasons. Something about fucking with the Odious King I bet.”</p>
<p>Entry 2: “It is today, but a different today. I got the radio to work. Literally just had to set up the stand and screw in the dual-band antenna. You can literally train a wastelander to do this. Not just any wastelanders but like the ones with down syndrome. I’m using it to play VNR. Problem is the button to make it work also turns the old piece of shit hosts on and they don’t turn off until they’ve wandered around screaming at the wildlife. Dunno why and don’t care to fix it.”</p>
<p>Entry 3: “It’s o’clock on today the third. I have decided to become a crop circle and arranged the hosts around the antenna. I stole everyone’s car and built a fort. Girls not welcome. I don’t even know anymore man. Execution may be illegal in the Academy, but damn if they aren’t trying.”</p>
<p>Entry 4: “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. Thank you for coming to my Tim Talk.”</p>
<p>Entry 5: “Every day I pray for death but death don’t come cuz the gods don’t answer my prayers.”</p>
<p>I pressed the radio button and came away from the terminal feeling like I’d just touched souls with the dead man. Sunflower Barrens was the name of this place? Felt right. The music that played from the radio next to the computer started off slow. Something bassy and electronic. It was an interesting pre-war artifact. It was ominously building up to something.</p>
<p>This had been an interesting distraction, but I needed to continue. I left the little car fort right as the music crescended, right before the big drop. Which is when I saw all the coffins were open and empty.</p>
<p>A blast of red energy shot from one of the houses, hitting my shoulder. I exploded into flames. Screaming, more from surprise than pain, I threw myself to the ground. If stop, drop, and roll couldn’t save me, I don’t know what would!</p>
<p>“Engaging unknown lifeform,” said a deep, but stilted voice. It sounded like a more lively construction robot from the vault.</p>
<p>Another one said, “Assessment: You must die.”</p>
<p>The worst part was the best thing to put out the fire was the vaguely sticky bits of blood from the man in the armor. I rolled it in like a horrible blood puppy. My shoulder stung and it looked awful, but I could function.</p>
<p>I grabbed Heartbreaker and got into cover, trying to see what the fuck was shooting me. Whatever they were, they were using lasers. <em>Dust energy weapons</em>. I jumped out of cover and punched, trying to pre-emptively blow away any shots. Yellow lasers erupted from within the buildings, a precision firing squad aimed at me.</p>
<p>The pneumatic blast of air did nothing to laser fire. They hit my fist, burning and burning, turning it slag on my very hand. I had to throw it away just to keep my hand intact.</p>
<p>A red laser shot past me. Whoever that belonged to had fire Dust. Had to be. I pulled out my microdust cell; it was just electrodust, yellow in color.</p>
<p>I tried to count the red dots on my HUD, wondering how the hell I’d missed them until now. Thirteen in total. Safe to say all but one was armed with an energy weapon. Shit, fuck, how was I gonna handle this?</p>
<p>“Scanning for hostiles,” one of them said.</p>
<p>A moment later it came out of the building, a rifle raised in one good hand. I saw it through the car window. It was one of the grotesque mannequins. It didn’t walk right. The jerky, uncoordinated way it moved, the metal under its rubbery fake skin. One of its rusted legs dragged behind it. Its head kept twitching, throwing off the straw hat it wore to reveal more metal. But those steel eyes remained locked on me. Even as the face was flat and unemotional, those eyes were unflinching and hostile. Like a serial killer wearing the face of his victim. It made my skin crawl.</p>
<p>I ducked out, resting Heartbreaker on the car and fired. I’d never been a gun guy, exactly. But like ever student training to be a Huntsman in the vault, I knew how to use one. Had to use them as a kid before figuring out which weapons worked best for me.</p>
<p>The first shot jammed. I frantically slapped and pulled at the gun, trying to figure how to fix it. The mannequin fired at me, the superheated beam of yellow light barely missing, coming close enough to singe my day-old-beard-fuzz.</p>
<p>I pulled the charging handle and a slightly bent bullet flew out. I fired. The recoil hurt my shoulder, but the bullets ripped into the mannequin, tearing its metal organs apart.</p>
<p>“I am the victim of violence!” it cried out in that weirdly unemotional voice, before it stopped moving. As if to sell that it was actually dead, the microdust cells inside its plastic gun exploded violently, frying it and the entire mannequin.</p>
<p>Exploding shrapnel and a hail of laserfire forced me back. More and more of the mannequins emerged from their cover. Each one more grotesque and mutilated than the other. One had synthetic guts hanging out, catching around its legs so that it tripped over its own entrails with every step. Another had an arm replaced by a comically tiny doll’s arm, its face covered in googly eyes. They were like a corpse horde from an abstract artist’s fever dream. And they all wanted to kill me.</p>
<p>They advanced and fired at the same time, covering each other perfectly. I couldn’t move Couldn’t pop out for cover. The car I was behind was starting to glow red hot.</p>
<p>“Hailee, I need you to,” I tried, and stopped as I realized what I’d been trying to do. Old instincts. Just old instincts.</p>
<p>They’d occasionally put team OCHR against larger groups of Huntsmen trainees. Seeing how we’d do against groups less skilled than us. The tactic was easy. Get them to focus on me, while Hailee shot over my shoulder at them, and Renee and July Child flanked. Hit the larger group fast and from multiple angles.</p>
<p>But I was alone out here. No team to command to victory. Just a merciless horde of corpse robots. My knee hurt at the <em>idea</em> of trying to run around them, assuming I’d even survive that far.</p>
<p>“Ozpin!” I yelled, desperate for something, <em>anything</em>. “How the fuck do I use my Aura?”</p>
<p>I’d used it once before, but back then it was calmer. I couldn’t figure it out back with the raiders, and now, thinking about Hailee and the vault didn’t turn it on. What the hell was I going to do?</p>
<p>I felt a mental tug and found myself looking at the suit of armor.</p>
<p>“I can’t use that!”</p>
<p>Ozpin didn’t reply.</p>
<p>He had to know. Had to know I didn’t know…</p>
<p><em>The machine gun</em>. It was gene locked. I couldn’t use it. But inside that big drum had to be ammo. Dust like in the cell I had. The highly explosive kind. I ran over to it and grabbed the drum, squatting down to use my legs, putting my back into it. My knee <em>screamed</em> with the effort, but I tore the drug off and got three mostly charged microdust cells for my effort.</p>
<p>I ripped the bunny-ears off the radio, killing the music. Bending it let me tie all of my cells together. They didn’t stick together right, a little too loose, but it worked. I spun around, looking for a direction with the least red on my compass.</p>
<p>“Now I understand,” one of them said. “You are hiding because you fear death. Curious.”</p>
<p>“Humans. So fragile,” another added.</p>
<p>“He will pay for killing the handler.”</p>
<p>The first of them appeared at the entrance to the car fort. A huge hole in its chest sloppy covered with a “Kiss the cook” apron, it stared at me, and smiled at me. Its rubbery cheeks split with the gesture, tearing open a hole on the side of its face.</p>
<p>“Found you,” it said with an almost satisfied glee.</p>
<p>I stood atop the power armor and entered VATS. I tossed my grenade down to the ground and targeted it.</p>
<p>The bullet ignited it. My knee screamed as I backflipped to catch the momentum. In VATS, everything was like a slow moving disaster. I caught the sudden shockwave, shoving the mannequin to the ground and sending me flying, arcing over the car fort into the air.</p>
<p>For a moment, I saw the entire horde, flanking the fort from all angles. They turned to me, staring to shoot before their guns were even aimed.</p>
<p>VATS ran out and the ground rushed to greet me. I punched the concrete before I hit it, the pneumatic force picking me back up, launching me across the cul-de-sac and into a house’s front door, once again proving door knobs were overrated. I crashed through it, nearly breaking my good shoulder, and rolling to cancel the momentum.</p>
<p>There was only one red mark here. I could deal with one. I grit the teeth and sucked in air, ignoring the pain. I needed to get out of here. Behind me, the red dots were moving slowly, the corpse mannequins too clumsy to chase me at speed.</p>
<p>Problem one, I couldn’t find the mannequin in the house. I made my way down into a partially collapsed kitchen. The massie hole in the wall leads outside. But now the red dot inside was spinning on my HUD.</p>
<p>Where the h—</p>
<p>“Self destruct sequence initialized,” the mannequin said, dropping down from a hole in the ceiling. It fell down onto me, grabbing me from behind. “Sal-u-tations!” As if to emphasize itself, it rammed a knife into my back and held it there like a handle.</p>
<p>I slammed my back into a wall, trying to break it off. The mannequin held on. Counting down.</p>
<p>“Seven. Six. Five. I hate you. Four.”</p>
<p>Last idea! I grabbed Poledancer’s knife spear off its sling on my back and used it as a lever to pry the robot off. It worked enough for me to pull the spear back and then <em>shove</em> it back through the machine, pinning it to the wall.</p>
<p>“Three. Two. Goodbye.”</p>
<p>I punched forward with the last possible airbust on my one good gauntlet. On principle, I refused to watch as the mannequin exploded. At the cost of the force sending me tumbling outside into the sunflowers. Minor dots of radiation ticked on my Pip-Boy as I crushed through their stalks.</p>
<p>I coughed and pushed myself to my feet, seeing the stars. The house behind me started to collapse, kicking up clouds of dust and debris. I started hobbling. Then walking. And finally running, ignoring the pain. Just running. Moving. Escaping.</p>
<p>I ran and ran until the red dots all vanished, and I was all alone in the sunflower barrens. The wound in my back was bleeding, further soiling my armor. But I could handle it. It wasn’t that deep. Just another thing that hurt.</p>
<p>I let myself fall to the round, panting, sucking in greedy gulps of air. Everything hurt.</p>
<p>“What,” I cried, and coughed. “What were those things?”</p>
<p>A wave of sickness hit my guts. Oh no, no you weren’t! You weren’t going to steal my only meal of the day, Ozpin!</p>
<p>“They’re a sad reminder of lofty goals we could never attain,” he said, still sounding faint, but pushing through the pain. “But I shouldn’t be surprised.”</p>
<p>“But what are they?” I asked, pressing my face to the dirt and closing my eyes.</p>
<p>“The scraps of Project Polendina,” he said. “Mankind redefined. Vale was never truly able to replicate Pietro’s work, but it was a hope. All we had was hope. Because we all knew how the story would go.”</p>
<p>“You mean the end of the world.”</p>
<p>He laughed, a sickly, almost desperate noise. “You might call it that. Mankind has arisen three times. Once from Dust, once from mud, and now from ash. I’d almost call it a cycle. If I hadn’t ended it myself.”</p>
<p>“You’re doing that cryptic nonsense thing again, Ozpin,” I said. I needed to take long breaths through my mouth.</p>
<p>“We all knew how this game would end, Ozrick. Knew as soon as we first wore the Crown Atomic. We merely chose the lesser evil.”</p>
<p>“Fuck it,” I groaned. “Fuck your stories. If you’re gonna be silent when I need you out there, then just tell me how I can make my Aura work on command. I don’t wanna scream for your help like this. Just tell me how to do that and you can sleep again.”</p>
<p>He paused. “I’m sorry. A mentor like me can only do so much on a journey of self-discovery. This is your soul, not mine.”</p>
<p>I coughed and fought to hold down my meal. “I’ll be a ghost just like you if I can’t figure it out!”</p>
<p>“You and the rest of your species,” he said.</p>
<p>I tried to speak and gagged. Ozpin went back to sleep. Gradually the sickness left me. Once again, I was alone.</p>
<p>It was an hour before I felt good enough to stand and stumble on out of the Sunflower Barrens.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>---</p>
<p>
  <em>Level up!</em>
</p>
<p><em>New Perk:</em> <strong>Power Through</strong> — <em>“Yeah, I’m scared. But I’m still standing here!”</em> — At the cost of draining AP/reducing passive AP regeneration, in combat you can ignore crippled limbs.</p>
<p><em>Skill Note:</em> Unarmed (50)</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Volume 1, Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><strong>Chapter 5:</strong> Hung</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“The weak die, the strong live. Those are the rules.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>— 12 —</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Floating.</p>
<p>Couch.</p>
<p>Man.</p>
<p>“Hello there!” the man called out.</p>
<p>I stood up from where I’d been crouching on the riverbank, using my Pip-Boy to test the radiation levels in the water. The Sunflowers Barrens had ground to a sudden halt some time back. As the day wound on, I was having my doubts I’d find anyone friendly. People, possibly. Raiders or those evil mannequins. But no one I could talk to like a civilized being.</p>
<p>I didn’t suspect that would change here.</p>
<p>Until the man with the floating couch showed up. An old leather recliner wedged into the center of a large rubber inner tube. Leashed to the couch like dogs was a flock of spherical robots that looked a little like radios, covered in antennae, floating in the air by little black crystals of gravity Dust. He’d been using them to pull him up the river, deeper into the island.</p>
<p>I didn’t miss the firearms strapped to the robots. They eyed me as the man stepped onto the shore.</p>
<p>“Nice to meet a fresh face in these parts,” he said. If only he could say the same of his own acne-scarred face. He’d painted a black domino mask over his eyes, both of which were different colors and seemed oddly reflective.</p>
<p>I stepped back, thinking of how the raiders had been eating that man. “I’m actually stale. Too long in the freezer. Studies indicate I may be a leading cause of childhood diabetes.”</p>
<p>The man laughed, the little bell on his hat jingling. “I mean someone pleasant to look at. Someone I can do bidness with who don’t shoot at me on sight. And ain’t no raider I know carries that.”</p>
<p>“My Pip-Boy?”</p>
<p>“Yeah, that old piece of BeaCo trash,” he said, all smiles. I didn’t like that smile one bit. “You might not be the Silver-Eyed Saint, but I’d wager you’re a vault dweller all the same. Say, I’ll trade you a couple eyebots for it. And whatever’s in their bags.” He snapped his fingers, and the leashed robots hovered over towards us. He reached into one of the canvas bags each one was carrying and hummed. “Titty mag. For some reason it’s perpetually damp. But that technically means it’s an infinite source of water. Valuable!”</p>
<p>I stared at the man in disbelief. “Not interested, thanks. It’s too precious to me.”</p>
<p>“Eh, your funeral.”</p>
<p>“Why’s that?” I asked, slowly reaching for Heartbreaker.</p>
<p>He shrugged. “Them trash can boys got hands stickier than this magazine for anything with at least a couple blinking lights. I’m up this way because I wanted to keep my eyebot flock.” He gestured to his robots. “They showed up from near the Emerald City not too long ago, put glue on their mittens, and started nabbing. I came to Patch just to avoid that kinda drama. Doubt they’ll be here long, at least.”</p>
<p>I felt a pang of Ozpin’s nausea. I had to admit I was interested too. “You’re from the mainland?”</p>
<p>The man smiled toothily. “Where do you think ol’ Trash Panda here made his junk fortune?”</p>
<p>“What’s it like? Compared to all this, I mean.”</p>
<p>“Ruined by heroes,” he said, oddly solemn. I felt there was more to it, but that this was something that bothered him. I didn’t press it, and he shook the mood away. “Patch is a nice place to raise a family, if you’re into that kind of thing. Plague don’t hit here as hard. And it’s greener. Lots greener. Fewer bombs hit here than the mainland. For that, I’ll take my chances with the storms.”</p>
<p>“Storms?”</p>
<p>“You’ll see, if you haven’t,” he said with a wink. “Wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise. Just—seek cover if the wind ever starts screaming your name.”</p>
<p>“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, confused.</p>
<p>“Now do you actually have anything to trade, or am I just gonna leave here all sad and empty-handed?”</p>
<p>I pulled out the locket with the picture of the silver eyed woman. “I don’t have much, but I got this. It worth anything?”</p>
<p>Trash Panda examined it, the little bell on his hat jiggling cautiously. Somehow. “Not ipso facto. But someone loved this girl. You can feel it in the metal. Means this is some premium Grimm bait. I’ll give you fifty caps for it. That’s a good deal; I’m only doing it because you look mildly retarded in that vault suit.”</p>
<p><em>I’m sure Summer wouldn’t mind</em>.</p>
<p>“Wait, caps?”</p>
<p>Yes, caps. Bottle caps. It turned out that since the world ended, people decided that that thing used to keep soda fresh would be the perfect way to keep the economy fresh. “Hotlander water barons started doing it, and it just kinda spread,” he explained. That also meant all the money I’d looted from that safe was worthless except for as paper.</p>
<p>“Not that I’ve ever seen one,” Trash Panda said of the Grimm. “Always been too smart to linger in those parts. Though there was one man I suspected of being a skinwalker.”</p>
<p>“A what?”</p>
<p>“Eh, don’t worry about it. Old wives’ tales,” Trash Panda dismissed. “Anyhow, we have a deal?”</p>
<p>“Do you have any good medicine?” I asked, rubbing my still injured shoulder. Both of them hurt, but the raider’s gunshot wound still ached when I moved it.</p>
<p>“Couple stims. No hydra or doctor’s kits, I’m afraid. Why?”</p>
<p>I avoided telling him why, in case he saw it as weakness and thought it’d easier to kill me for my stuff. Coach Yarrow always told me to walk injuries off while folks could see you. Couldn’t let people know you could get hurt. “Bad for morale,” he’d said.</p>
<p>I wound up trading the locket and my useless pre-war paper for some food, bullets, and an old weapon repair kit. Plus a couple old stimpaks. I got the feeling I got a good deal.</p>
<p>“Another satisfied customer,” he said, sitting down on his floating couch. The momentum pushed it off into the water.</p>
<p>“Hey, one last thing!” I called out. “Downriver. Are there people? Settlements? Farms?”</p>
<p>Trash Panda mushed his eyebots. They beeped and dutifully dragged his couch raft upstream. “A few. Nearest is Forevergreen Mills. They’re open for business now, but it’s a wreck. I got out of there as soon as I could.”</p>
<p>A sudden cacophony of music from his eyebots ruined my attempts to ask more.</p>
<p>— 13 —</p>
<p>As far as “people who didn’t want to kill me” went, Trash Panda had been up there. He’d also won by default. Forevergreen Mill was at least a direction, a concrete goal. And if they were open for business, maybe I could figure out a way to work out a trading deal. Provide food to Vault 4, whether they wanted it or not.</p>
<p>The sparse forest eventually turned into the wrecked scrapes of buildings. I found myself walking a concrete pike path alongside the river. The area here looked far more destroyed. All the trees were old shriveled husks, and the river was full of wrecked little boats. I even passed a bombed out bridge that was still mildly radioactive. It looked more like what I expected of the Wasteland to be.</p>
<p>According to the Pip-Boy, this region was “Cimbra’s Scar.”</p>
<p>I found an old vending machine in the part of the trail that had ducked past the bridge. It was even still glowing, buzzing with an electric dim humm. From the glass bottles and old needles on the ground, I doubted there’d be anything inside. To my surprise, after ripping the door off, I found a lone bottle of WildFire root beer inside (“Our signature SassPatch sarsaparilla with Black Sheep espresso”).</p>
<p>Even if the day was winding down enough that I could start to make out that green glow on the horizon again, I had to try the drink. The vague radiation the Pip-Boy registered as I popped the cap burned less than the drink’s fizzy texture. Reading the ingredient label on the back, I saw the bottle claiming, “SassPatch is made from genuine sassafras. Claims that sassafras causes cancer are false. Organic plants do not cause cancer. Because nature is pure.”</p>
<p>Good to know.</p>
<p>Behind the machine somewhat had painted “Peaches Rool Heer.” Almost looked like they’d written it in blood. Reminded me a gang tag like you’d see in parts of the lower vault.</p>
<p>Drinking the soda, I got to thinking about the music I’d heard during my fight with the mannequins and then against from Trash Panda’s eyebots got me curious. Wondering if I’d get anything, I tuned my Pip-Boy to the station labeled RAIDIO.</p>
<p>
  <em>Legends scatter</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>Day and night will sever</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>Hope and peace are lost forever</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>This will be the day we’ve waited for.</em>
</p>
<p>The actual song was rather enjoyable. Sounded like something you were supposed to work out to. It was something I could happily walk to. Vault 4 had its own radio station, but it mostly played stale, vaguely patriotic pre-war tunes or whatever music they could rip of old holofilm soundtracks in-between official announcements. The radio on the outside was a lot more lively.</p>
<p>I stood there, leaning on a railing, sipping soda in-between looking at my Pip-Boy. There was a section next to radio stations called photos (one new photo). I tabbed to it and saw the new photo was the one I’d taken of Heartbreaker. The rest were people I didn’t know. At first I didn’t think much of it, figuring I’d delete them later so dead people stopped living in my wrist-computer, until I saw the golden haired woman from the poster in the vault. Except the background was somewhere bright and grassy, the colors more lush and <em>alive</em> than anything I’d seen in the Wasteland.</p>
<p>She was standing outside Xiao Long house, one arm wrapped around a shorter girl with silver eyes and a flowing red cloak. The shorter girl had bags under her eyes and the makings of crows feet, but didn’t let it stop her from smiling. I almost got the sense that the expression was equal parts genuine and forced, like she was smiling as much for other people as for herself. Both of them were wearing goofy novelty animal hats they were way too old to wear.</p>
<p>“It’s nice seeing them happy, even if it’s just some old photo,” Ozpin said.</p>
<p>I groaned. “Oh hello there. Haven’t seen you in hours.”</p>
<p>“You didn’t need me.” He paused. “I wonder how many photos there are on your device. Judging from the camera angle, I’d say these were synced from her scroll, not taken with the Pip-Boy.”</p>
<p>Sometimes talking to him hurt. Sometimes it felt alright. This was one of the later times, like most of my encounters in the vault. “Did you know them?”</p>
<p>“Once upon a time I did,” he said as if confessing to some crime. “They were the greatest heroes Remnant ever knew, girls bound together for decades by friendship and a determination to do the right thing.” He chuckled sadly. “Like fairytale characters come to life.”</p>
<p>I looked into the silver eyes of the girl in the photograph. “Who were they?”</p>
<p>“That might be the most important question you ever ask,” he said with faint amusement.</p>
<p>I squinted towards the water, trying to catch sight of his reflection so I could glare at it. It didn’t work, but I think he got the message. “I doubt that.”</p>
<p>He sighed theatrically. “ Ruby Rose, Yang Xiao Long, Blake Belladonna, Weiss Schnee. They and their friends all. Lie Ren, Nora Valkyrie, even Jaune Arc for all his blunders.”</p>
<p>It was a lot of names at once, none of which meant anything to me. Except one. “Xiao Long? Was hers the house I looted outside the vault?”</p>
<p>“Childhood home, yes. Her and Ruby. She’s the girl with silver eyes in the photo.”</p>
<p>Idly curious, I slid left to see the next photo. The same woman with silver eyes, a wild grin on her face. Ruby Rose, apparently. She looked like she was emerging from a cloud of rose petals somehow to tackle-hug a man who had otherwise been trying to look respectable. He wasn’t the tallest man. Tanned skin like a hydroponics worker, with freckles he was too old for. He held a stylish cane in arms that were bandaged from the elbows down and—</p>
<p>I flinched, a pit in my gut. Ozpin gasped.</p>
<p>“Could you not?” I said with a cough, exiting out of the photos I’d been snooping through. I took deep breaths.</p>
<p>Ozpin made an uncomfortable noise. “I… I’m sorry, Ozrick. Just startled to see that face.”</p>
<p>“You and your memories,” I groaned. “Let me guess, some rival of yours? Were you jealous those woman liked him more than you?”</p>
<p>He was silent. All I could hear was the radio station.</p>
<p>“Ozpin,” I said warningly.</p>
<p>“Os<em>car</em>,” he corrected, sounding woozy. Feint. Someone not getting enough hydration after a long day on the field.</p>
<p>“Great. Three Ozes.”</p>
<p>I could feel the toothy grin around the words, “You have no idea, Ozrick.”</p>
<p>Before I could get him to say anything else, something shot at me. I ducked for cover, dropping my soda in the process. There was <em>something</em> in the river. It spat a mildly radioactive globule past me, then huffed loudly, like an annoyed old man. I shot a round at it, only for Heartbeaker to jam. C’mon, and I just fixed you up!</p>
<p>I killed the music to focus on clearing the rifle. The monster in the water huffed again and submerged. A moment later and not even VATS could find it.</p>
<p>Guess everyone’s a critic.</p>
<p>The crow perched on old power lines behind me cawed like it was laughing.</p>
<p>I cleared the jam. “Do you want to be next, bird?”</p>
<p>The animal just cawed at me. Far from the only other animal I’d gotten a good look at, the bloodhound, the crow just looked weird. It looked burned, with patches of dry, raw skin visible. Using VATS to get a better look, I could see it had two sets of eyes. One kept their eyes on me as it flew off downriver. Seemed like we were going the same direction, birdie.</p>
<p>“Were animals always like this?” I asked.</p>
<p>Ozpin, of course, said nothing. Guess it wasn’t worth his time or something.</p>
<p>For a Wasteland, this place was oddly deeming with life. Now it just needed some people who didn’t want to kill me. I needed civilization.</p>
<p>— 14 —</p>
<p>Civilization was down the river, over the railroad tracks, and beneath a mass execution. In the distance I saw smoke, signs of a town. But here, there was just the tree, the corpses, and the men beneath it beating a boy to death.</p>
<p>They were better dressed and armed than the raiders. My Pip-Boy didn’t mark any of them as hostile. I watched at a distance, in a mix of horror and awe. Trash Panda had said he got out as soon as he could. Was this the reason? Was the smoke because the town was burning? From my vantage point near the ruins of an old locomotive, they couldn’t see me.</p>
<p>The tree itself was massive, sturdy branches twisted in every direction like it were trying to greedily soak as much space as possible. Instead of leaves, it a resting murder of crows, screaming hungrily at the corpses. Dozens of them. Their bodies beaten, mutilated, and bullet riddled, I doubted this was how they died.</p>
<p>This was a message.</p>
<p><em>She</em> was at the very top of the tree, hanging above everyone else. What I originally mistook for wind was her struggling. Bound at the feet and legs, a rope around her neck, all she could do was struggle, watching them beat the boy to death. I found myself staring; they’d strung her up completely naked. At her elevation, she could see me. Did see me. And we met eyes.</p>
<p>The raw, primal hate in them made me flinch, but I had to look again. Transfixed. Without realizing it, I found myself leaving cover and walking towards the tree, staring at the hanged woman. Ozpin’s nausea alongside with a curious dread mixed in my guts.</p>
<p>“Hold it there!” one of the men said, turning from the boy. He aimed a shotgun at me. “Not one step closer. The fuck are you doing here?”</p>
<p>I snapped from the spell, looking at the four people dumbly. I found my voice somewhere and said, “Point that at someone else. I’m just looking to trade.”</p>
<p>The boy tried to cry out, and a man with a sword bashed his nose in with his pommel.</p>
<p>Shotgun man eyed me skeptically, then laughed. “Well, check at that. Not even a day in and business is already booming. Fuckin’ A! Apologies for the rude greeting. Welcome to Forevergreen Mills.”</p>
<p>I didn’t move. “What happened here?”</p>
<p>“Took out the trash,” the lone woman in their ranks said. “Under new management now and all that.” As if for emphasis, she picked up a rock and tossed it at the struggling woman in the tree.</p>
<p>This close, I could better see all the hanged woman’s bruises, all the blood. She’s been partially bandaged, but even those were soiled. The hate in those eyes didn’t even wane as the rock hit her face. She didn’t even flinch.</p>
<p>“All of them?” I asked.</p>
<p>“Just be glad them Peaches folk is all dead,” the shotgunner said, idly watching his crew kick the boy on the ground. “Mostly dead. Sorry you had to see this, man.”</p>
<p>I just looked on, skin crawling. “So town is that way?”</p>
<p>“Ayep,” he said. “Oh, and talk to Euchre in the bar if you’re looking for work. We lost a lot of hands, and could be some good caps in it for you to help.” He smiled. “Tell ’em Arbuckle sent you with an apology you had to see all this.”</p>
<p>Slowly, that cold dread in my guts remaining I turned for the town. Even started walking. But I could feel the red-eyed woman’s gaze on me.</p>
<p>“Get off me!” the boy shouted.</p>
<p>“Hey, Arbuckle. We’re out of rope.”</p>
<p>“Just cap him and be done with it,” he dismissed. “I’m late for a smoke break.”</p>
<p>Gunshot. The boy screamed.</p>
<p>The girl laughed. “Missed.”</p>
<p><em>Do better</em>.</p>
<p>Whoever those people were, they were probably bad guys. Maybe even raiders. This was the outside Wasteland. This was just how justice worked here. Had to be. Like in those old movies about the Frontier. This wasn’t my fight. My fight was to save my home, my vault. Everything else was a distraction.</p>
<p>They shot him again. The boy just screamed and cried, begging for them to kill him.</p>
<p>I found myself thinking of the mob in Vault 4. The security officers who came after me. Tried to shoot me and Hailee. I’d only been trying to help. I’d fucked up, but I was <em>trying</em>. Was this how they’d treat me if I cowarded out at the vault door? If they’d brought me to justice, would this have been my fate?</p>
<p>Is walking on what a Huntsman would do?</p>
<p><em>Do better</em>.</p>
<p>“Oh, hey, you forget something?” the shotgunner asked me.</p>
<p>I grabbed his arm and pulled his face down into my elbow. I stole his gun as he fell and swung it into the girl’s face like a vaultball bat. Then I fired the weapon, letting the recoil rocket it into the third man’s face.</p>
<p>The crows in the trees shrieked in panic. They took to the skies, showering me in a light downpour of feathers. The man who’d been beating on the boy stood up, reaching for his weapon. I sent a pneumatic blast at his lungs, sending him tumbling back.</p>
<p>It was over in a quick, bloodless instant.</p>
<p>I pulled out Heartbreaker, used VATs to target a branch.</p>
<p>The hanged woman fell. I reached out, expecting to catch her in my arms like a damsel in an old story. Instead, she twisted, hitting corpses on her way down, and landing on her bound feet beside me.</p>
<p>For a moment, we locked eyes. Beaten, poorly bandaged, and full of hate. I could see the long vertical scar from her pelvis to her breasts, like she’d been the victim of a botched full-body C-section. They were far from the only scars she had. She was bound to have a host of new ones once her current wounds healed up.</p>
<p>I had expected to tell her to run. To untie her, try to save the boy, and help her escape. To play the Huntsman hero. Then move past Forevergreen Mills to some other town, searching for a less murderous civilization. I’d made the right choice. It had to be. Just, its fallout wouldn’t be easy.</p>
<p>But looking at her, I found myself unable to talk. A wave of Ozpin’s sickness choked in my throat. Fear and horror at the very sight of the girl. Those clean red irises. I struggled to stay standing.</p>
<p>She whirled and held her tied arms up, catching a sword with the ropes. I’d forgotten about everyone else, and how they were getting back on their feet. The man stood there stunned as she ripped her binding apart, grabbed his sword, and forced it back between his eyes.</p>
<p>I stumbled back as she stabbed behind herself, stabbing the woman. She spun around, spilling her guts out. She grabbed the pistol from her hip and shot the third man. Blood spraying everywhere, she threw the sword into shotgunner’s face, and fired every single bullet left in her gun directly into the pommel, driving it all the way through his skull.</p>
<p>Calmly, almost gingerly, she grabbed the blade and tore it from his head, splattering her naked flesh with gore and gray matter. With a final flourish, she stabbed the dying boy through the heart, ending him instantly. The blood shot out, and she just stood there, naked, covered in it.</p>
<p>Then it was over. Everyone was dead. Everyone but me and the red-eyed woman.</p>
<p>“Give me your jacket,” she said.</p>
<p>I stared at her in stunned silence. A crow landed nearby and laughed at me. They were already starting to return, eager for a feast.</p>
<p>“You killed them all,” I said dumbly.</p>
<p>She flashed me an impatient look. “With that kinda attention to detail, you must be a real champ at I-Spy. Now give me your jacket.”</p>
<p>“The boy, you killed him too.”</p>
<p>The hanged woman wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “Connie was a good kid. But he shouldn’t have come back for me. You heard him begging in pain. No doctors around that wouldn’t’ve killed him on principle. And those aren’t the kind of shots a stimpak could do anything more than scab over. He wasn’t going to survive those wounds.”</p>
<p>“You can’t know that.”</p>
<p>“He certainly didn’t survive the one I put in him,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “Y’know what, you’re obviously retarded. Why am I arguing with you?” She grabbed the sword from the boy’s chest.. “Your jacket. That gun too. Anything you’ve got. Hand it over.”</p>
<p>Silence opened behind the words like a knife wound.</p>
<p>“What?”</p>
<p>She shot me an impatient look. “You’re obviously too stupid to survive out here long; letting you go with all that stuff would be wasteful.”</p>
<p>“Are you… robbing me?”</p>
<p>“Yes!”</p>
<p>“Oooh!”</p>
<p>I expelled the air on my slagged gauntlet to her sword, surging forwards to grab her free wrist. She kneed me in the groin without hesitation. She let out a surprised grunt; of course my suit would include dick protection. I played <em>sports</em>. I rammed my head forwards, headbutting her into the tree.</p>
<p>“Don’t do this; I just saved your life!” I said.</p>
<p>She put a finger to her nose and blew out blood. “And now you’ve drawn blood. We’re now even. I don’t owe you anything.”</p>
<p>The hanged woman leapt forwards. I tried to parry her swing, but she ducked under my arm. Her leg wrapped around mine and he pulled. She was smaller than me, but fast. I felt myself falling before she leg-threw me into a corpse. She jumped atop me in seconds.</p>
<p>I twisted my gauntlet and blasted the last pressured air, enough to shoot me to my feet. She kept her legs wrapped around my chest, still naked as the day she was born. I grabbed her in a bear hug, trying to pin her in place. She reached around me, and I felt the sword stab into my back, not far from where the mannequin had stabbed me.</p>
<p>Screaming, I let go. She leapt off me, cartwheeling backwards to her feet. When she landed, she winced hard, and nearly fell, but kept upright. Her bandaged leg didn’t look so good. I reached around and pulled the sword out of my back.</p>
<p>“Would people please stop stabbing me from behind?” I screamed.</p>
<p>“Deal,” she said, holding up a double-barrel shotgun.</p>
<p>“Not what I meant!”</p>
<p>I was never good with swords. Always too clumsy to pull off the deft feats other Huntsmen could before. Why do you think I preferred to punch my problems? But I did my best to ape July Child, my former teammate, spinning the blade with the help of VATS.</p>
<p>It didn’t work. The buckshot boom shot huge steel pellets at me. The sword hit them, sure, but the impact shattered the blade. Red-eyes threw the shotgun at me, hitting and driving the broken tip of the sword into my chest.</p>
<p>Red-eyes was on me in a second, unarmed, and kicking. She spun, kicked, twirled, kicked. It clearly hurt her legs, but she knew I couldn’t keep up. Just barely able to block. I tried to use VATS to hit her, but she ducked the punch, grabbed my fist, and used my own arm to polevault a kick to my face.</p>
<p>I stumbled back, seeing the lights of the vault stadium in my eyes. Focus, Ozrick, focus! One last idea. I grabbed Heartbreaker with my left hand.</p>
<p>“Really?” she laughed, batting my gun away until it was facing backwards in my hand. “C’mon, vault meat. You’re too slow.”</p>
<p>I gripped the gun as tightly as the improper grip would allow. “I know.”</p>
<p>And I fired.</p>
<p>The recoil threw the weapon forwards. Fast enough to catch her across the face with the buttstock.</p>
<p>I stuck out my leg, tripping her. She stumbled, trying to catch her balance. I fired again. Buttstock met face. I rose my pneumatic fist over her head and bashed. There was no art or elegance to this. This was just a raw beatdown brawl.</p>
<p>I was good at those.</p>
<p>Red-eyes collapsed onto the ground in a splay of naked limbs. I was left standing there alone amidst a field of corpses, under a tree with bodies for leaves. I fell back onto my ass, propping myself up on the tree. Everything hurt. My face. My fists. The stab wounds in my chest and back.</p>
<p>I injected myself with a stimpak. My wounds instantly burned and tingled in equal measure. The roar from my rapidly emptying stomach made me double over. I filled it with water from my trusty Vault 4 canteen to trick it into thinking I was full.</p>
<p>In hindsight, what the fuck had all of this accomplished? I tried to be a hero. Do the right thing. Now people were dead. Everything was worse. Unless you were a crow; they were already coming down to pick at the corpses.</p>
<p>Given just how perilous human life was outside, I could see why people might turn to cannibalism. It seemed to be the most readily available meat around.</p>
<p>One of the more mutated crows landed on the hanged woman and cawed, spreading its leathery wings. It pecked at her face. Looked at me. Pecked again.</p>
<p>She stirred, weakly trying to push it off. It flew off screaming. She just lay there, more bruise than girl, staring up at the sky. I couldn’t follow her gaze. The open sky still made me lose my footing.</p>
<p>“Hey, kid,” she said weakly. “Why’m I still alive?”</p>
<p>I looked away. “Couldn’t kill you.”</p>
<p>“Had me dead to rights, kid.”</p>
<p>“Spiritually,” I amended.</p>
<p>She laughed.</p>
<p>“You’re dumb, but you’re good. If I wasn’t already hurt.” She coughed. “I’d almost say you were a good fight.”</p>
<p>“I’m glad years of eating my vegetables finally paid off.”</p>
<p>She snerked. “The gun thing was clever.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, I’m a quick learner like that,” I said slowly. “Now what? Do I just leave you here, and then in a couple months you show back up to kill me, get your vengeance?”</p>
<p>She snorted. “You’re pretty low on my revenge list, kid. Considering I’m naked and you just beat the shit out of me, staying that low down there’s an accomplishment.”</p>
<p>I wrinkled my face, looking away, trying not to think about that too hard.</p>
<p>“Those people in the tree. Yours?”</p>
<p>“My tribe,” she said. “I was last. They wanted me to watch them all die.”</p>
<p>“Hard to believe four people did that to you.”</p>
<p>A laugh. This mirthless, unsettling noise. “It was the whole town and some of their friends. Ambush. Betrayal. Whatever. Those four were just there to gloat.”</p>
<p>“And the boy?”</p>
<p>“Survived. Escaped. Came back for me. You saw what they did to him.”</p>
<p>“Why?”</p>
<p>“I’m a raider. I’m part of a tribe. I’m up there on the ranking board. Like it fucking matters.”</p>
<p>“I met raiders before. Not good people.”</p>
<p>“‘Desperate people’ and ‘good people’ ain’t usually the same people. Now is this going to be some interrogation? Because if so, just let the wounds kill me, vault meat.”</p>
<p>I sighed. I felt a pang of Ozpin in me. Had to shake that away so I could focus.</p>
<p>“Hey,” she said at length. “Got another stimpak? Maybe some hydra? Ox painkillers?”</p>
<p><em>Do better</em>.</p>
<p>“Depends. Will you try to kill me again?”</p>
<p>“I don’t know; I’ve never had someone save my life twice,” she said, forcing a toothy smile. “Who knows what I’ll do.”</p>
<p>“Stimpak,” I said. “On one condition.”</p>
<p>Red-eyes let out a shuddering breath. “Yeah?”</p>
<p>“I want to know your name.”</p>
<p>She was quiet for a long moment.</p>
<p>“You first, vault meat.”</p>
<p>“Ozrick.”</p>
<p>“Known a couple guys by that name,” she said. “Killed most of them. Was fun. I think you’re the best Ozrick I ever met, though.”</p>
<p>“And your name?”</p>
<p>She laughed. “Raelyn. Of the Peaches tribe. Now, mind saving my life a second time?”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>--</p>
<p>
  <em>Level up!</em>
</p>
<p><em>New Perk:</em> <strong>Quick Learner </strong>— <em>“Good luck studying. That’s wrong by the way!”</em> — You might not have been the best study in school, but always were a quick learner. At least when you were on your feet, if not the classroom. Gain +2 skill points every time you advance a level.</p>
<p><em>Companion Perk Added:</em> <strong>Raider Bitch</strong> — <em>“I’m a pancake, bitch, but I take the cake”</em> — While Raelyn Peaches is in your party, you gain +5 Damage Threshold (DT) against “civilized” people and gain access to unique dialog options.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>a/n: At this point, Patch is turning into a strange mix of F76 and Van Buren. Also, what's with Ozpin's story? Who's this Oscar Pines guy? Something doesn't add up.</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>